


On a White Horse

by ms_qualia



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Medieval, Ensemble - Freeform, F/M, Forced Marriage, Slow Burn, historical fiction - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-31
Updated: 2016-03-06
Packaged: 2018-05-17 09:32:10
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 13
Words: 32,369
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5863972
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ms_qualia/pseuds/ms_qualia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The wake of the Black Death brings new opportunities for the lucky few who survive.   Kylo Ren survived and has gone riding to collect what is his.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

The knight rode, flanked by his soldiers, on through the night and into the day.  They would have taken refuge at the Inn at Maidenhead, but the air smelled sickly, full of death.   They passed and rode on.  They would take their rest at their destination, between the rivers.  The sun rose and peeked through the trees.  They came soon, to a clearing and the air once again took the same foul stench of emptied chamber pots and the unmistakable smell of not-long or deeply buried death.

The knight kept a sachet of sweet herbs in his visor, but medicine could only do so much.  His horse picked up on his energy and halted.  He pressed his legs together to urge it forward again.

He rode between the fields of what he knew, from the accountant at the manor, to be rye, although he could not tell it from wheat.  The peasants could tell these things at a glance, the way a chicken would know its mother on the day of its hatching and follow it, and the way he picked up a sword and knew, as a child, it was his to wield.

However, all was not right.  He’d heard rumors of a comet, although he had not seen it.  He believed in the evidence of his eyes, and what he saw was the rye wilting, the sun up, and the peasants nowhere to be seen.  Nobles and peasants alike breathed foul air and it boiled out of them, out of their necks, out of their groins, in phloem-filled tumors, their fingertips turned black, and no divination or medicine or priest could assure any one of them was spared.  He once saw a man, one of his, bleed from his eyes as he vomited in his own bed and the doctor tried in vain to drain him of bad humors.  He could see it again, clear as if it were happening in front of him.  

The knight could hear them muttering in the distance, and he was brought back to the present.

They came to a stone church.  Outside of the hallowed ground, marked by a stacked stone fence, two men dug a pit.  A dozen shrouded corpses lined the edge of the hole.  One of the diggers was unusual: a moor, perhaps.  The knight had heard of them, seen a painting.  The moor glanced up.  He had an F, for “fugitive,” branded on his forehead, a thick pink scar.  

It meant that he, as many peasants did, had demanded higher wages and was idle while demanding them.  The law set the fair wage for a day’s work, but many peasants tried to turn disaster to their advantage as bodies piled up and labor grew scarce.  The law demanded he be punished.

And so he had been. But now the man was working, burying the dead and the brand was evidence he had served his punishment.  Perhaps he was penitent.  The knight was indifferent.  The moor spotted him first, before the other man, and his eyes widened in terror.  No doubt another black-armored knight would have given him his punishment.  The other man, dark of hair, looked up.  He said something the knight did not understand.  The knight looked at the horizon.

“Votre prêtre, où est-il?  Aller le chercher,” the knight replied.  The men glanced at each other.

“No French.” the black-haired man said.

“Priest,” the knight said, straining at the hard anglo “r.”

The moor pointed at one of the shrouds.

"Je dois parler à quelqu'un. Qui parle français?”

The men caught a word or two, clearly, and took his meaning.  They spoke to one another.  The black-haired man, from his body language, ventured a suggestion, and the moor took offense.  The knight caught “she” and “her.”  He sighed, testily, and dismounted.  He led his horse to the field of rye, to a post, to let her feed on the tall and dying grain, then headed toward the archway of the little church and to its heavy doors.

"Je vais payer mes dettes à Dieu avant de me fixer vôtre,” he muttered.  His men dismounted.  He waved at them.  He wanted to be alone with God until he had to do his business.

He removed his helm and crossed himself at the threshold.  The church was no cathedral.  It was not even as grand as the one attached to his barrack.  No enshrined saint relic.  Rows of benches and some basic stone masonry.  The cross was ornate— carved, wooden, and gilt— but this was not a village of means.

At the altar, before God, he crossed himself again.  He knelt, and prayed, for the mercy of God, for the forgiveness of sins.  He prayed to see, once more, the dream he had been shown: of Christ harrowing hell and him, by the Grace of the Son, leading the knights out of its gates.

Through his eyelids, he saw the light brighten.  The heavy door of the church swung closed.

“Sir,” said a piping voice.  He turned.

It was a woman, thin and fine-featured.  She was not fair as women at court, but dark from labor in the sun.   Her hair was unveiled and braided.

“Are there no men who speak French?”

“Not anymore,” she said.

“Who is in charge?”

“No-one, sir.  I’ve been asked to speak to you.  I can do business on the village’s behalf.”

“This is very  _unnatural_.”

“We’ve lost thirty people in a fortnight,” she said. “These are  _unnatural_  times. There are men at war abroad, I hear.  Pestilence has already visited us.  You ride in on a white horse, to ask for two pounds and six of barley for a day’s wages, no doubt.”

“Do not damage the oil and the wine,” he said.  She chuffed.

“You’ve read The Book?” he said.  She pulled her head back in surprise.

“No, sir.”

“And yet you quote it.  In French.  Nonne Linguam Latinam loqueris?”

“N-no.  Our priest was well-read, and I am a good listener.”

“I daresay you could give me a lesson in the scripture.  Would you pray with me?”

He motioned to the altar in front of the cross, where the priest took eucharist and couples knelt to be married.  She flushed and looked at the ceiling.

“My head is not covered, sir, it would dishonor me.”

“It dishonors you to speak to a man alone."

“We are in the presence of our Lord and Savior, sir.  We are not alone.  What is your business?”

“You remember scripture well,” he said.  “Where did you learn French?  The—“

She finished his sentence “— priest.”  He gave her a toothy smile.

“Are you his bastard?”

“I was found,” she said.  “He was fond of me.  I do not know beyond that."

“He was noble,” he said.  “A second cousin of mine."

“If I am relation to you, I have no knowledge of it,” she said, firmly.

“It would be little effort to have you legitimized,” he said.

“I will find you someone you are more comfortable speaking to,” she said.  “I will translate for you.  Laban Miller is old, and he is syphilitic, and he is more your speed,” she said.  “You can talk about our failed harvest with him.”  She curtsied and turned, furious.

“I have a letter from your father, my cousin, Father Luke,” he said.  She froze.

“Is— is that so?” she said.

“Did he tell you that you were his?”

“He did not say so outright, no.”

“He believed his time was at hand and thought of your wellbeing.  He asked me to plead your case, and I have done so.  He says you are educated, you can read.  He says your French is passable, although I would say it’s very good.  He said you are white-limbed and honest.  You are neither.  It speaks highly of you, how his love clouded his perception.”

He advanced on her.  She backed slowly to the door until she was pressed against it.  He was barely a few steps from the altar.  Her fingers wrapped around the door handle.

“He had little basis for comparison.  He did not mean to compare me to a lady, I am sure.  He was mistaken.  There is another young woman in the village who looks a fair bit like me.  I will find her for you.”

“No need.  You are a lady, by God’s grace and your birthright.  It’s plain.  Only a lady is beautiful as you are."

“Father Luke told me he’d heard half the ladies at the court were maggoty, and the other half were likely pock-scarred.”

His mouth tightened.  “He was frank, my cousin.  More than half are dead.  A few will be taken in hasty marriages by the time I return, I wager.”

“I suppose I am now among the fairest available.”

“The very fairest.”

“And I, legitimized, would come with this parish as my dowry.”

“As you say.  I had hoped my lady would be quick.”

— She pulled the door open suddenly, and she was out, bolting like a hunted doe who had caught the hunter’s scent.  He cried out for his men, and was after her, on her heels.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, some misconceptions:
> 
> "Peasants were poor and stupid and uneducated!"
> 
> Well, not SO much. From what little we know, they were litigious and well-versed in the law, to the point where they burned the right law documents to erase their own debts in the Peasant's Revolt of 1381. Enterprising, educated peasants like Phasma could make enough money to dress indistinguishably from nobility, own expensive things like books etc.
> 
> Also, the prudish middle ages with super oppressed and shy damsels are kind of an invention of the Victorians. Women in the Middle Ages were *not* expected to be shy and retiring or undersexed. A lot of our nudity and sex taboos come from a time hundreds of years after this is set.
> 
> As women became more powerful, as the peasants became more powerful, laws popped up to put them "back in their place." The ones targeted at women won't crop up for a while after this fic is set.


	2. Chapter 2

She had jumped over the fence and into the rye before his men had time to react, startling his horse.  He made a quick calculation.  He would not find her in the rye at his current vantage point.  He glanced over to where his horse, Justine, was tied.

One of his men had unsaddled his horse. Quickly, he pulled the bit out of her mouth, quicker than untying her, and climbed the fence, then onto her.  A skilled horseman, he directed her with his legs, first to circle back, then to leap over the fence.  

They landed, the rye smacking Justine about the head and neck.  She balked, but did not rear.

He looked ahead, searching for the woman.  The rye parted ahead of him as the woman ran through it.  His horse, well trained, still shook her head apprehensively at being pressed forward through the mud, where she could not see her own legs.  

He encouraged her into a fast trot, which gained him no ground.  The woman cleared the edge of the field seconds before he did, but when he did Justine opened into a canter and closed on the woman as she reached the foot of a steep hill.

The woman heard the horse behind her and bent over, hands on knees, panting.  The hem of her kirtle was muddy.

“Done already?” He sneered.

“I was not going to outrun a horse.”

“I would not have ruled it out, myself.  You _are_ quick.  We still have business.”

“I have none with you, sir.”

“Members of your villenage have neither harvested nor plowed their lord’s field in a week, at least.”

“The dead do not owe tribute to any lord but the Lord.”

“And yet the living here are idle or working on their own tasks.”

“We are forbidden to work the land without paying a death tax, _sir_ , as you _well_ know.  As a man who has never worked a field, you might not know that harvest is not a job we can do with the men we have remaining.  We might be able to if not for the extra work imposed upon us.”

“What _imposition_?” he said, his voice tinged with the hint of a threat.  She ignored it.

“We have to take it to the common mill a day’s journey so _milling_ can be _taxed_ , sir,” she said through her teeth,  “That and harvest takes forty men, no less, or the grain sits too long and starts to sprout and sour, and gets consumed by birds.  We would have our own mill, but our _lord_ has forbidden it.”

“So it should fester in the fields instead, my lady?”

“I reckon it makes no difference to the birds, so why should I care?”

“Because you waste the property of your lord and your king, and of the God who gave it to them.”

“I say the King of Kings or someone lower has decided what to do with the rye, and who am I and who is my feudal lord, and who is my king to argue?”

“ _I_ am your lord, and I will thank you not to blaspheme.”

She tilted her head back.  She swallowed.  “You are not the Earl.  He is not young.”

“I am his second son.  The first is lost, with his wife and infant these three weeks ago.”

“And so you’re marrying your lady love at last,” she said, sarcastically.

“And so I am marrying, yes.  I— my father and I— we are your closest kinsmen and now guardians.  I pled your case, I claimed your father had married your mother in secret before he was ordained, and he joined the priesthood in his grief when she died.  I lied about your age before my King and God to make it plausible.  _Me_ , a pious man.  I paid the marriage tax. I could have had any other eligible maid.  I was at the King’s court, one would have _gladly_ had me.  I chose to take _you_ from this.”  

He gesticulated at the mud in the fields.  Justine took a step back and forward, and he leaned forward to steady her.  “You are a _very_ hard-won prize,” he said, steadying his horse and his voice.

“If you wanted to _own_ me you should have left me a villein. Take your death tax, leave us, and find you another maid.  If you have mercy, let us go to find a new villenage.”

“They have all broken down as yours has, my lady.  There is nowhere left in three day’s journey but the manor house.”

Her mouth opened.  For a full minute, she had nothing to say.  He took satisfaction in her silence.  But as grief began to creep into her look, as she started to contemplate the number dead, he felt disquieted.  He had seen distressed women before and felt no pull to do anything.  Discomfort was life, and women, by their nature, cursed to feel it more strongly.

Perhaps it was like when Justine was injured or sick.  Any other horse was a horse.  _His_ horse, however….

“Tell the remaining souls in the villenage to gather their hariet,” he said, hurriedly.

“You would _still_ take our best livestock for the right to work the land?  I have told you we are too short-manned, livestock is our only hope.  Who at your Manor will be taking care of our cattle?  My neighbor’s goats are dying in their pens from neglect, and I hear the manor was worse hit than we.”

“The survivors here will have to,” he said.

“ _What_?”

“Have them pack their things, take the livestock they can and leave the weak ones to die.  I want them on the road tomorrow.”

“We still have people sick here.”

“I will give the sick three days to come to me or go to God.  There are homes available by the manor if they can bury a few more bodies.  The hariet will have to do as the first month’s rent.”

She wet her lips.  She ventured, “We will not work for villein’s wages at the manor.”

“Villeins will work wherever their lord tells them.”

“I imagine it would not be hard to find another lord willing to make them a better offer.  Higher wages.  Lower rent.”

“That is not _legal_.”

“And who would enforce the law?  Who is left?  Will you brand us all?  Execute us?  Just three of you and the two dozen left of us?”

He ground his teeth.

“Am I wrong, sir?”

His horse, feeling his change in stance shifted under him, betraying him to the woman.  She smirked.

“I will _discuss_ their station and their wages and their rent with them should I have an _interpreter_ with me.”

He glanced her up and down.  She was red-faced, muddy, tan, and furious and, in her way, something else.  He exhaled.

“I had hoped… Your description did not do you justice.  I admit I was taken by it.  I had hoped you might be grateful, Rey.”

He ventured her name for the first time.  It came out as a soft, throaty sigh.  His face tightened.  He felt exposed.

She flushed.  “F-for _what_?”

He turned his horse, his face screwed up with frustration. “I will take you direct to a convent if you refuse marriage. That is your right.  That is your _only_ right.  But I will not stand at the door to see if any are left alive inside.”

“You have the grace of a gentleman.”

“And you a lady.  If you do not translate for me, my English is not good enough to make your friends _any_ offer.  I will not make them my _best_ offer until we arrive at the manor.  If we cannot speak, my first offer will be _singularly bad_.  Do you understand me?”

“ _Sir_.”

He turned Justine back into the field.

“What should I call you, sir?” she shouted after him, as Justine pressed her face through the stalks of grain.  She cleared her throat.  “To the villagers.”

He sat up higher on his horse.

“I am called Sir Ren,” he said and pressed Justine into a trot.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Notes:
> 
> When a villein's father died, they owed taxes and fees so they could inherit the right to work the land. The tax would be cash (usually), and the fee would be the villein's best animal. The animal was called a hariet.
> 
> Feudalism was based on the idea that God gave the king land to manage. He collected rent from feudal lords, who collected it from peasants. There were taxes on everything, from milling to death to marriage. Villens were also expected to spend about half the work week providing labor on land their lord owned. 
> 
> Villens were essentially owned by their Feudal lord, and not really allowed to shop around for better wages and conditions. They could be punished for leaving their lord with branding or other torture, and were supposed to be brought back to their lord if they fled. This rule was not consistently enforced when lords became desperate for labor, however.


	3. Chapter 3

The woman took her time returning.  Ren spotted his men intrepidly trying to make it across the field and utterly turned around.  He pointed them back toward the church.  The two gravediggers’ apprehension turned to boredom when they saw Ren’s face and his still-sheathed sword.  They returned to their work, dragging shrouded bodies one by one into the pit.

Rey came back through the fields, her kirtle pulled up between her legs and tied up, like a pair of breeches, to save it from further muddying.  Her legs were pale and muscular.  Ren quickly averted his eyes.

The gravediggers whistled, and she rolled her eyes at them and said a few words.  The black haired man raised his eyebrows at her and looked at Ren.  She nodded and waved a hand at the pit in a dismissive motion, then untied her skirt from around her waist.

“I told them you’re the lord’s boy.  Poe’ll get you lodging after court.  Tie your horses here and wait for him, and he’ll take you.  I'll get everyone.”

“Court?”

She nodded.  “We’ve got some inheritances to square away.  Some old fines and debts.  They should be taken care of before we make a clean start elsewhere.  Old Han passed and we haven’t had time to elect a new elder.  But you’re the lord’s son.  You’ll do as stand-in.”

“I— I don’t—“

She held her finger up to him.  “No.  No.  _We_ pay taxes.  _We_ give fealty. _You_ have duties.  And it’s St. Barnabas's day, so you’ll be feasting us.  It’s been six months since we’ve been treated by the lord, and we could use a distraction.”

He motioned at the horses.  “We did not bring food or wine.”

“Then you’ll have to pay us back,” she said.  “Cash.  You brought cash, sir?”

She saw his answer in his face, mixed with incredulity.

“Good,” she said.  “I think Marjorie has twin lambs….”

She spotted a blond, ruddy woman down the dusty road, peeking around her cottage.

“ _Oi_!”  Shouted Rey.  She lifted her skirt and ran to the woman.

Ren stood with his mouth open.  He glanced back over at the gravediggers, who were leaning on their shovels, watching Ren’s body language.  The moor nodded his head upward, a slow smile spreading across his face and blooming into a leer.

“ _Rey_ , huh?” he said.

Ren understood _that_.

“Ta gueule,” he snapped.

He was left to watch the men bury the bodies.   After a time, they heard a bell sound, off in the town center.   The two gravediggers stopped their work, walked to Ren and his men’s horses, and untied them to lead them off.  Ren and his men began to follow.

The black-haired held up his hand to Ren to halt and pointed down the road, in the direction of the town.  He glanced down the road and saw Rey running to him, kirtle hitched, ankles exposed.

“I need your men,” she said.

“For what?”

“I’ve got two finished barrels in the church basement.  Marjorie knows where, have them help her.  We’re having the feast straight after the men finish court.  I’ll translate for you.”

Ren raised his eyebrows.  “Father Luke brewed?”

It was customary for priests to brew, but Luke had not mentioned brewing as a pastime in his letters.

“ _I_ brew,” she said.

He tilted his head at her in surprise.  She pursed her lips at him.

“Have you met a lot of women?”

He cleared his throat.  She stood there and waited for him to say something.  

When it was clear he would not reply, she said, “I do mean it.  Tell them to help.  Marjorie and the other women will need it.”

He cleared his throat and turned to his men.

“Aider les femmes à la préparatifs d’une fête.”

“Seigneur…?”

He pointed in the direction Rey had come from, toward the waving jolly blonde woman.  

“Allez!” said Ren.

George, the younger of his men, elbowed Robert, the older.  They removed their helms.  “On va aider les femmes comme _ça_.” said George.  He held his hands at waist height, grabbed the air, and bucked his hips.  Robert snickered.  Ren thumbed his nose at them and turned back toward Rey.

—

“Do I need to tell them which one is Marjorie?” Ren asked.

“Oh, Marjorie will find _them_ if they keep up like that,” she replied.

He chuffed.  He glanced over at her.  From the look on his face, it slowly dawned on him that she was not joking.  For a moment, she thought he looked disquieted.

Rey led him into a large building, not so differently made from the nicer stone homes closer to the center of the village, but slightly larger.  It had a wooden sign with a little lamb and seven stars crudely painted on it.

“We only have one boarding room in here,” she said.  “Your men can have it, it’s not fit for a lord.  We’ll put you up in old Han’s place.  We’ve kept the windows open and burned some herbs in there, it should be clear of bad air.”

“Thank you.  You’ve organized court and a feast in a very short time.  My lady would be well suited to run a manor.”

He took two more steps before he noticed she had stopped in her tracks.  He turned toward her.

“Have I offended you?” he said.

“I haven’t decided,” she said.

He approached her, loomed over her.  She stood straighter, defiantly.  His eyes moved over her.  She was not dressed very fashionably, as Marjorie did, or Phasma the tavern-keeper.  She liked attention less.  Her bodice did not cling to the curve of her hip, or expose the full tops of her breasts.  Men still found something to look at.  Few had been so forward about it.

“What would make you decide?” he said.

He had that Norman look, the look of a man whose recent family had taken brides from France, with a proud roman nose and high cheek bones.  He had thick, dark hair and pale, smooth skin.

She took a step back.  She rubbed her hands together.

“I’d appreciate it if you would not stand so close when we are alone,” she said.

“I would not dishonor you, my lady.”

“What if one of your men were to challenge you for ‘your lady?’”

He furrowed his brow.  “They would not.”

“What if they were to?  And won?”

He turned his head and looked at her from the side of his eye.

“Why would you have me imagine that?”

“Would he be dishonored by _taking_ me, if he had won me from you?”

“… No.”

She nodded emphatically.  Bitterly.

“We’ve met a couple of knights around here.  We know chivalry. You come around, give us a feast, leave with our best animals.  Cart a few of our young men off to France to be slaughtered along with our lambs, while you noble boys come back all pretty.  They’ll ransom _you_ if you’re caught and just cut us villains open like fish at Lent.  You’ve been to France?  Done your time for the King?”

“I was at Crécy, yes.”

Her mouth became firmer as her resolve did.  “More men than we can count didn’t come back to the village.  All the nobles did, though, didn’t they?  They got ransomed.  We know who _chivalry_ is for.”

“It could be for you as well, my lady.”

She shook her head, mouth twisted in disgust.  “No.  No, I don’t think it can.”

“You think I’m just a brute?”  He carefully removed his riding gloves, folded them, and stowed them in his belt.  His hands were large and calloused.

“A brute with rules.”

His hand rested on the hilt of his sword, his shoulders down.  He stepped forward and leaned down to her face.

“You’d prefer I have none?”

“If pretense is all that’s keeping you from taking me here and now, I’ll keep the pretense,” she said.  “But I won’t be wed to Death himself, on his white horse.  I would rather join an empty convent and die knowing Christ.”

He studied her face.  He tried a different tone, softer.

“Madam, I did not correct you, but I fear I must assist your understanding.  Death’s horse is _khlōros_ , the color of corpses.  It is Christ’s horse which is white.”

“It’s less like blasphemy to call you Death than Christ.”

“On the contrary.  A husband should be the representative of Christ to his wife.  I would be as Christ to you.  And you _will_ know me.”

He did not pronounce it like a threat.  It was a soft, low promise, projected with the authority of a man who was used to ordering men to march to their deaths and was used to being obeyed.  The alien inevitability of him grabbed her by the marrow. The hair on the back of her arm stood up as if it had suddenly gotten very cold.  She held her breath, waited for the moment to pass, and exhaled.

"I need a drink," she said.

She pushed past him, her shoulder knocking his arm.  He rolled it out of her way, to her relief.  The spell felt broken, for the moment.

He followed her into the tavern.  He was tall enough he had to stoop a little to get through the door.

The men were already there, seated, at the long table where they held court every fourth Sunday after Church.  A half dozen heads-of-households and two widows.  They stared.  They'd undoubtedly heard the argument, perhaps picked up a word or two.

"Good morning, Rey," said the tavern lady.  She set a pair of mugs down near the head of the table.

"Phasma," said Rey, nodding to her.

"I hear we have an Earl's son here," said Miller.  Phasma rolled her eyes.  What Miller said had not been daft, but Phasma knew he was working towards daft at a quick pace.

Poe and Finn wandered in behind Rey and the knight. 

"Oi," said Finn.

The knight started a little, and peevishly shuffled forward to the head of the table, to the elder’s seat.  He stared at Rey.  She didn't move.  Finally, he indicated a seat on the long bench, to his left.  The men shifted down for her.  She cleared her throat and sat herself on the bench.

The present villagers shot one another looks.  Miller burst into laughter.

"Oh, he's got it _bad_ for you, miss."

"Thank you, Miller," said Phasma sarcastically.

"Qu'est ce qu'ils disent?" said the knight.  _What are they saying?_

"Il n'est pas important," Rey said.

"When's the wedding?" said Poe.  Finn grinned at her.

"Je ne sais--"  Flustered, she started in French and caught herself. "I do _not_ know what you're talking about, Poe.  _Finn_.”

"You could do worse than an Earl's son," said Miller.  "You're already at his left hand.  Just get him drunk and drag him to the church door."

"Miller, if you don't shut it I'll help Finn argue his case for free," said Phasma.

Miller had the sense to cringe.

This was a real threat.  Phasma, as the daughter of the former tavern-keeper, and now widow and sole proprietor of the tavern, had been at nearly every court since she was a babe in arms.  Once she realized her advice tended to decide a case in her favor, she stopped giving it for free.  Phasma had even stopped at the Court of Common Pleas on the way back from a pilgrimage.

Between her two businesses, proprietress, and legal counsel, she was formidable.  Add to that her connection to her favorite son, now a well-respected cleric living in Oxford, and nobody dared cross her.

"I've been meaning to ask you about tha—“ said Finn.

"Half a dozen eggs," Phasma said, cutting to the point.

"Three," Finn countered.

"Say, now—“ objected Miller.

"One," said Phasma.  "And from your brown hen, not the white.  Your white looks poorly."

"Done."  They shook on it.

"We're starting now," said Rey.  The villagers quieted.

" _We need to do the invocation, do you know it?"_ Rey said to Ren.

_"I know the one I use at Ren Court when I’ve presided.”_

_"Just say that one,  I'll correct it if it's wrong."_ He scowled at her. _"If they think you don't know what you're doing they won't abide by your decisions."_

_"I am their lord."_

_"And if you want to yell that at them while they're throttling each other over something stupid you didn’t fix, go right ahead.  If you say something daft, I’ll correct it.  If you don't sound like you know your ass from your ankle I'll never hear the end of it."_

_“Why do you care if I make a fool of myself?”_ he said.

She crossed her arms and looked away, toward the other villagers.  She felt somehow more uncomfortable with her neighbors’ frozen, not-very-polite-smiles than his incisive gaze.

"Everything OK?" said Finn.

"Just filling him in on your thrilling egg deal," snapped Rey.  She and Ren stared hard at one another.  He blinked first.  He looked out across the table and started, in a clear, well-projected baritone, perhaps a little too loud for the size of the crowd.

"Oyez, oyez, oyez, all manner of persons owing suit and service to the King's most excellent Majesty, and to the Earl of Ren—”  He paused to give Rey a moment to translate,  “—draw near and give your attendance to the court held here, on this, St. Barnabas's Day.  May God save the King and his lordship the Earl."

Rey finished translating.  "God save the King," murmured everyone in response.

" _I didn't need to change it,_ " she said, begrudgingly impressed.

" _Of course you didn't."_

She suppressed the urge to roll her eyes while others were watching and avoid further interested looks from her neighbors.  

 _"Have you considered_ ** _waiting_** _a moment before spending the good will you earn from me?"_ she said, keeping her face carefully neutral.

_"I will take it under advisement, my lady."_

And so, court began.  Rey translated between Ren and the villagers, leaning up to him and speaking quickly and lowly.  He leaned down to hear her, moved his chair closer, and she did not scoot away.  The most pressing matter was inheritance (mere formality, as nothing was in dispute), followed by minor farming disputes. 

While there was a fence on either side of the road to keep traveler's horses out of the rye, the common farm land used by all the villeins was not fenced.  The land was surveyed before each plowing season and divvied up evenly, with much arguing as to what “even” consisted of.  Once it was settled, they would drive stake at each corner of a field and plant sod between them to mark the boundaries.  This did not keep people from plowing over the line, or leaving clods of dirt and sod on their neighbor's property.

This was a favorite trick of Miller’s.

"I had no intent to plow into Finn's allotment," said Miller, lying.

"But there is no dispute you _did_ , which is all the law requires,” said Phasma.

"A whole chicken--" began Miller.

"A young one," interjected Finn  "Not a cockerel, a hen.“

" _Living_ ," emphasized Phasma.

"-- is too harsh a fine," finished Miller.

"Not for repeat offenders," said Poe.  He continued, pointedly to Ren,  "His dad was worse than him.  They made his dad give my dad a cow."

Miller flushed and jabbed his finger into the table.  "A whole cow, pregnant, in _winter_.  They kept the calf!”

"So?  Be grateful we're not asking for more, then, there’s precedent,” said Phasma.

Miller smacked his palm on the table, ”I want to re-open that case.”

" _No_." said the table, resoundingly, including Rey, interrupting her translation mid-sentence to shout him down.  He brought that blasted calf up almost every month.  Ren glanced at her and she finished the sentence for him.

" _Non!"_ Ren interjected belatedly.

"I request punitive damages," said Phasma.  "He is clearly wasting this court's time."

Ren nodded.  "You have long outstanding debts and have the gall to re-open a long-settled matter here, sir.  This crosses from dispute into a question of character. I'm afraid I _must_ award punitive damages.  You will be required to give a day's work a week to Finn for a season.  He may rent your services out for that day if he can't stand the sight of you.  If you do not do this, it will become a criminal matter.  I am unlikely to decide in your favor should it come to that."

As Rey translated, Finn beamed and caught Phasma's eye.  She gave him a tight smile.

"How will I make my livelihood if I have to work three days in your field and one in Finn's?"  Miller pled.

"I have taken that into account," said Ren.  "We will be... re-negotiating your living arrangements.  All of yours. But no more talking from you, Miller, or it will be contempt.  This is settled.”

Rey paused.   She had intended to reveal the move later, when she had time to think of how to present it in the best light, but he didn’t shy away from mentioning it himself.  She decided Ren was very unlikely to phrase it in a more appealing way if it came up again.

She translated it directly.

Everyone at the table paused to soak it in.

"Was this what he talked to you about earlier?" said Phasma.

Rey paused and nodded, slightly.

"You think it'll be a good-faith offer?" asked Poe.

She glanced between him and the people seated there.  She said stiffly,  "I'll have to sweeten the deal."

Even Miller had the sense to shut up. The men glanced between Rey and Ren in a worried, knowing way, but had no strong objection.

Phasma, on the other hand, turned red.  ”We need to talk," she said. "You and I.  Alone."

Rey nodded.  She put her finger to her lips, then rubbed her face, passing it off as an itch on her upper lip, she hoped.

_"What are you saying?"_

“ _They gathered you might mean to move us,_ ” she said.  " _They are surprised_."

_"Ah."_

Marjorie burst in, ruddy, beaming, and holding a lute.  She was not young; her blonde hair grayed at her temples and a few scattered capillaries had burst across her nose and cheeks, but she was full of irresistible sunshine and mischief.  The straps of her kirtle slid off of her shoulders in a way which was calculatedly accidental.

“Are you still at it?” she said.

“I think we’re almost done,” said Phasma.  Miller scowled.

“Then get out of that dim room and join us outside.   The lamb’s roasting and we’re going to have some fun before it’s done if I have to drag each of you out.  Phasma, get that book.  I want a story after the boys play football.”

“Oh, _that_ book,” said Finn, grinning.  Phasma leaned over to him.

“Oh, you like that book?” she said, huskily.

“Everyone likes that book,” said Poe.  Finn nodded.

Rey cringed as she translated.

 _“What book?”_ Ren asked.

“ _It’s, uh… you’ll see._ ”

Poe stood first, taking the lute from Marjorie’s outstretched arms, and kissed her on the cheek.  She returned it.  The other men and Phasma did the same as they passed her in the doorway and she laughed and poked them in the ribs hard, in proportion to her affection for each of them.  Ren shot Rey an aside glance.

 _“You_ ** _will not_** _say a bad word about her in front of me,_ ” hissed Rey.

_“I don’t want her to touch me.”_

_“She knows not to touch a lord,”_ Rey re-thought the statement.  _“I think.  Just scoot past her.”_

Ren stood.  Rey hung back, nervous of what either might do.  He approached Marjorie as if she were his greatest opponent, shoulders square, hand on the hilt of his sword.  She smiled at him broadly, easily.  One of her eye teeth was missing.  She didn’t break eye-contact with him.  He stopped halfway to the door.

“Does he speak English?” Marjorie said to Rey, not looking away from him.  “His boys don’t.”

“Not a word,” replied Rey.

Ren screwed his courage to the sticking place and advanced on her once more.  Marjorie leaned against the door frame, blocking it fully with her shapely hips.  Her breasts heaved over the top of her gown as she breathed.  He stopped less than an arm’s length from her.

“Excusez-moi,” he said.

Marjorie feigned benevolent ignorance.  She placed her fingertips on her lower lip and sighed, shoulders forward, effortlessly sensual as only Marjorie could be.

“Huh?” she cooed.

He flinched.

Marjorie, two and a half heads shorter than Ren, laughed and peeked around him at Rey.

“Oh, this man’s a virgin, love,” said she said.  She looked back up at his face, and up and down his body.  

“W-what?”

“Pure as new snow.  He fakes it well, but he’s all tight in the hips.  See?”  she waved lazily in the direction of his pelvis.  He looked over his shoulder at Rey, horrified.  He did not ask for a translation.

“Oh, but his face!” said Marjorie.  “And those hands!  May I keep him?”

“I-I think he’s, uh, preoccupied with other things.”

“You should have him.”

Rey did not feel like explaining her situation.  “I’ll, uh, think about it,” she said.

“Well, someone should,” Marjorie said in mock-disappointment.  She caught the look in Rey’s eye.  “Oh, fine.  I think I’ll go with his boy Robert.  I’ll think of this one, though.”

“You do that,” Rey said.

Marjorie cleared the doorway for Ren, who hurried past her like a man who had seen his own approaching death.  Rey followed, but not without a kiss and a poke from Marjorie.


	4. Chapter 4

As Ren stepped outside, his man Robert tossed him something round.  He, unthinking, caught it.  It was warm, round, full of air, and vaguely sticky.

A lamb's bladder.

"Gameball," said Robert.

"Gameball," confirmed George.  Both had changed out of their breastplate and chainmail to doublet and hose.  George held a stack of Ren's clothes.

He looked behind him, at Marjorie, giggling, and Rey giving him her best withering stare.  Finn and Poe whistled and shouted what Ren assumed was "gameball" in English.  A few younger men who had not served on the jury jumped out of their cottages and called further down the road.

Marjorie said something to Phasma, who shook her head.

"Phasma and I will attend to the feast," said Rey.

"Do you two usually play?"

"We have.  If they're short-manned."

"We're short-manned now.  It's usually village versus village."

"I thought you'd find it _unnatural_."

"I'm curious to see what a woman is capable of."

"I'm sure you are," she said.  She looked for his reaction.  He had none.  His brows furrowed, however, when he saw her pause and watch him.  He opened his mouth to speak, and she cut him off.

"My uh, stronger beer isn't bad.  I'll let you have a taste later.  If you win."

He looked out over the assembled crowd.  He handed the bladder to Rey and motioned for George and Robert to come over and help him with his armor, too heavy for sport.  They removed his breastplate and he pulled his chainmail over his head.  He was only in his shirt and breeches.  He glanced behind him, at Rey, who had averted her eyes.

Marjorie would meet his gaze, however.   Too easily. She grinned at him and looked up and down his legs.

George helped him step into woolen hose and pointed boots, and finally, a black hooded surcoat.  He motioned for Robert to place his sword and armor in the tavern.  Once he had returned, he told his men to stand with the rest of the male villagers in the crowd in front of the tavern.

Women assembled at the edges of the square.

“Oyez!" he bellowed.  The murmuring crowd quieted.  He glanced back at Rey, held out his hand for the bladder.  She gave it to him.

"Translate," he said.  "Please," he added.  She sighed.

"Listen up!" she shouted.

He made a chopping motion with his arm, ball in hand, cutting the small crowd of perhaps two dozen men and boys in front of him in halves.  He drew motioned to his right.  This crowd included  Miller, Poe, and George.

"This half has the north entrance to the village, between the Rye fields, to defend.  They are the Rye team," Rey translated.

He motioned to the other half of the crowd, with Finn and Robert.  "This half has the South entrance to defend.  What is the--"

She realized that the next sentence was an aside for her.

" _What's the village entrance to the south?_ " he had asked.

" _The South entrance is the South Bridge_ ," she said, answering his question.  Ren continued:

"The other team has the South Bridge to defend, and is the Bridge team.  If the opposing team leaves the village by those entrances with the ball, it's a point.  First to five wins.  Anything goes with these exceptions: no weapons, no manslaughter, no biting--"

" _Wait, biting?_ " she asked him.

" ** _Robert_** _bites,_ " said Ren pointedly, glaring at Robert.  George nodded at her.

Rey glanced at Robert, who gave her a sheepish, gap-toothed grin.  He had not been in the sun much, and so managed boyish despite likely being older than Rey.  His hair, skin and eyes did not stand out from one another, blending into various shades of strong and weak tea-colors.  George was darker and heavier browed.

" _No_ biting," she repeated in English, projecting her meaning across languages and straight into Robert.  He bore his teeth apologetically.

Ren started again, quiet, his voice slowly building.

“ _No_ rough play around the genitals, _no_ taking anyone for ransom.  Do not pop the ball, do not hide it in your clothes.  With the exceptions of the roads on the other side of the goal lines, anything outside the village is out of bounds.  Game ends when the women are done with the feast regardless of whether we have reached five.  Last, you have my dispensation to touch me for the duration of the game." He paused and looked them each in the eye, and said, nearly shouting,  _"Do not bore me_.  Do you assholes understand me!?"

"Oui," said Robert and George, followed by a general "Aye!" from the villagers.

"I'm with the Bridge team," he said.  He handed the ball to Rey and joined the rest of the men on the north side.  He was half a head taller than the next tallest man.

" _My lady, if you would,_ " said Ren.

The men stared at the round bladder in her hands.  They all shifted from leg to leg, like dogs waiting for their master to put down a bowl of food.

She looked to the edge of the square.  The women disbursed, with a few of the younger ones hoisting themselves and each other onto the roofs of the square to get a better vantage point.  She waited until they'd cleared the roads.

She held the bladder over her head, pulled back, and tossed it far into the middle of the square.  The men were off.  Ren bowled over two members of the opposing team, who had the good sense to step in front of him.   He was not as quick as Finn, who dived upon the ball, rolled, and looked up for his nearest standing team member.  Ren sprinted past him and turned holding his arms open for the toss he knew was coming.  Finn popped the ball up and into his arms, and Ren kicked his heel below him, changing direction, running to the east and out of a square like a loosed arrow.

Three of his five pursuers slowed and skid.  One of the younger boys, Errol, fell.  Poe, however, slid, caught himself, and ran off after Ren.

Rey wiped the tacky texture from the bladder off her fingers, onto her kirtle.

Errol picked himself up.  He was tall for eleven, but not mature for his age.  He limped up to Marjorie, his former nurse, who pouted at him and held him to her bosom for a minute.  She permitted him a sob before shushing him.

"Off you go.  Try again," said Marjorie.

"I don't know where they went.  He's too big."

"He's headed round north eventually, dear, he's just trying to tire them out.  If Miller's smart he'll be off that way to tackle him before he gets across the line.  It'll take two or three of you to do it, like hunting any other boar.  Remember the boar hunt?"

The boy nodded.

"Just like that. Out-smart him and work together. Go to it."

The boy wiped the snot out of his nose, and jogged off to the north, limp miraculously forgotten.

"I don't coddle him, do I?" said Marjorie.

"I reckon we could all use a little coddling after the month we've had," said Phasma.  Rey nodded.  Marjorie sighed and wiped away an errant tear.

"Give me a hand?" said Marjorie.  "It's cooking itself, really, I just want to talk about that man's thighs.  You _did_ look, right?"

"I, uh--" said Rey.

"Rey's hired me for a consultation," said Phasma.

"Oh?"

"Yes," said Rey.

"I'm pretty good at consultation myself," said Marjorie.

"Don't doubt it, Marge," said Phasma, evenly, stonily.

Marjorie sighed.  Phasma couldn't be needled into dropping clues when she got like that.  She looked past Phasma and gave Rey the most pitiful, betrayed look she could muster.

"I'll tell you later, Marjorie," apologized Rey.

"You promise?"

"The best parts."

"My girl," she said.  "Give your old nurse a hug."

Rey obeyed and Marjorie flitted across the square, stopping to let the boys barrel back across the center of the square as she watched with naked delight.  Ren skidded across the cobblestones after them, nearly into Marjorie, swearing loudly and in French, Robert a step behind him.  Robert stopped just short of her, she took two steps back to avoid being knocked over.  She put her hand on her chest and gasped, startled at the expected outcome of her clumsiness.

It was genuine.  Nothing Marjorie did was not genuine.  Robert looked her up and down, flushed and paused a moment before following after Ren.

She shot a look at Rey and grinned.  "The game's afoot, love!  Isn't gameball a sight?" she called.

"He bites," Rey called flatly.

Marjorie grinned wider. 

"That a fact?  If you need me I'll be watching on my roof!"

"Don't let the lamb burn!" said Phasma.

Marjorie flitted off without answering.

"Her daughter-in-law is doing all the work on the lamb, I'd wager," sighed Phasma.

"You're probably right."

Phasma motioned for Rey to come inside.  She left the door open.  She walked across the tavern and opened the back door to let the breeze through.  It was just past the hottest part of the day, but she had a low fire going to keep the plague air out.  She pulled some herbs out of a bowl on the bar and threw them in the cover up the wafting smell of decay on the breeze.

“What should I pay you for your advice?” said Rey.

“You didn’t solicit me,” said Phasma.

“Whatever you’re going to say’s probably worth a few coins.”

Phasma shrugged and waved her off,  “On the house this time.  Sit.”

They sat across from one another.  Phasma took her veil off and started re-braiding her hair.

“My dear, he cannot make an honest wife of you.”

Rey scoffed.  “What makes you think I’d want him?”

“That’s not a denial, that’s evasion.  I can’t help you if you bullshit me like that.  Second, he looks at you like a hound looks at a carcass.”

Rey pursed her lips together.  Phasma continued.

“Even if he proposes to you, His Majesty and the Church will annual any union on the grounds of your unfitness for his station and would assume you bewitched him.  You are not his genus, no more able to have a fulfilling union than a sheep with a horse.  You’re not high enough born to even be his mistress.  It would agonize me to see you his whore.  Even if the men are fine with it, they can march right into hell if they think we’re making that trade.  Not even if rent were free.  Never.”

Rey swallowed.  

Rey could hardly believe she was about to argue.

“Be reasonable, Phasma,” said Rey, “not everyone here has the money to survive without settling elsewhere.  If we can re-group at the manor with better rent and wages we’ll thrive.  We’ll die here.”

“I have not always had money, my dear,”  Phasma pinned her veil back on, face hard with resolve.  “I didn’t make it through two rounds of this pestilence, lose my Brendol, my John, my Rachel, to just _hand over_ what’s mine.  He’ll have to take you from me.”

“I’m not yours,” spat Rey.  Phasma’s eyes softened.

“You know what I mean.  We’ve… when Father Luke showed up with you, he handed you off to Marjorie and I until you were old enough to talk.  You were everyone’s baby.”

Rey held onto her elbows and nodded.

“He… Father Luke was my sire.”

Phasma’s eyes widened.

“He told you that? ”

“Sir Ren did.”

“Is it true?”

Rey nodded.  “They wrote one another.  They’re cousins.  Sir Ren says he’s had me legitimized.”

“That’s not possible.  That’s not legal.”

“He says my mother and father were married,” Rey said, cringing slightly at the half-truth. “Sir Ren says I’m nobility.”

Phasma’s eyes darted back and forth as she thought.  “You’ve had no contact with the knight before this?”

“None.”

“Swear by Christ himself.”

“I-I swear it.”

“You need to say that quicker.  _Swear_.”

“I swear it,” Rey said, firmly.  “By God almighty.”

Phasma nodded and crossed her arms, calming herself.  “Maybe this will work.  You need to cover up your arms until they’re white.  You have to look the part.”

Phasma stood suddenly and walked over to the stairs.

“Hold, on, it’s not decided,” called Rey after her.

“Isn’t it?” Phasma shouted down.  “It would be advantageous if you can pull it off.  If he’s won your suit in front of the King, it’ll be hard to challenge your legitimacy without insulting His Majesty.”  Phasma leaned over the balcony, looked around at her tavern and muttered, “If I have to start again, maybe _I_ should re-marry.”

“Wait, you?”

Phasma met Rey’s eyes, and Rey saw she was resolved.  Phasma pushed herself away from the rail.  The boards below her cracked as she paced.  

“Yes, me.  I can’t even sell this tavern if nobody’s here, and it’s all my wealth.  I’ll have to ride circuit and argue cases for a few months to make money to buy another one.  I could use a man to watch my back and carry my things.”

“That’s not a reason to marry!” shouted Rey.

“It’s a _fantastic_ reason to marry.  It’s the _only_ reason,” Phasma said back, starting to raise her voice.

They heard shouting as the men ran through the square, still wrapped up in their game.  The women paused until they could no longer hear them.

“You are too political,” said Rey, a little more quietly.

“ _All_ happy marriages are political.  If you marry for love, that’s gone in six months.  If you marry for power, that will last you until you have babies in common.  Power, God and family are all that matters.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“I’ve had two happy husbands gone to meet Christ.  How many have you had?”

Rey bit her lip in frustration.

“Did you love either of them?” accused Rey.

Phasma paused.  She said, quietly, as if the words surprised her, “More than I ought.  More than my own babies.”

Rey’s mouth opened.

Phasma threw her down a pale bodice, long enough to cover Rey’s arms to the wrists, and blue kirtle.  It was Phasma’s late daughter Rachel’s.  Rey remembered it from Rachel’s wedding day.

“I am NOT wearing blue.”

“You are.  So am I.  Help me with mine on.”

“A-are you getting married _now_?”

“I’m not waiting long,” said Phasma.  “Might as well pray and dress the part for when God answers.”

“Who is the groom?”

“I have an inkling.”

Rey bounded up the stairs.  Phasma put a blue over-garment on with long arms, slit at the sleeves to show the rich fabric underneath.  Rey helped her lace it at the front.  Rey pulled her things— keys and a few coins— out of the pocket in her sleeve and held them in her hands while Phasma dressed her.

“There,” said Phasma.  She held her hands out for Rey to hold.  Rey obliged.

“We look bonny.  Bride and bridesmaid.”

Rey found the pocket in her new sleeve.  It was too long and fussy, and she had to hold her arms at her waist to keep them from dragging.  She felt miserable.  

“Which of us is supposed to be the bride?”

“That’s the point,” said Phasma.  “If we don’t know, how will evil spirits?”

“I’m sure _we_ are supposed to know.  I was happier when you thought I was whoring.”

Phasma reached into her wardrobe and pulled out her book— _the_ book she read at festivals.  They descended the stairs carefully, Rey hitching her skirt and looking at her feet to avoid falling.

“You’ll get the hang of it,” assured Phasma.  They stood between the doors and enjoyed the breeze for a moment.

They heard the shouting again.

“Aren’t they finished yet?” said Rey.

“I think they’ll go until dinner’s done,” said Phasma. She glanced at the waning sunlight streaming through the doors.   “Shouldn’t be long.”

It got louder.

Suddenly, behind them, through the back door, they heard footfalls.  Ren ran through, in his shirt and hose, his surcoat shed at some point.  He had the ball under his arm.

He looked the women up and down, and they looked at him.  He recovered himself and lept behind the bar, out of sight.  Poe ran in a second later, followed by Finn.  They both stopped.

“The _hell_?” said Poe.  Finn stood with his mouth open at the two women, dressed in virgin mother blue; unmistakably bridal finery.

“Just changed for the feast,” said Phasma, in an easy, knowing drawl.  She looked straight at Finn.  Finn pressed his lips together and hung back.

“Where’d he go?”

Finn shook his head slightly at Phasma, asking her wordlessly not to say anything.  Phasma inclined her head back at him.  Poe missed the exchange.

“Who?” she said.

Poe rolled his eyes and ran back out  Phasma glanced over to the bar with her eyes, then back at the door.

“Thank you,” mouthed Finn, and he ran after Poe.

Rey paused until the shock wore off.

“… _Finn_?” said Rey.

“He’ll do.”

“ _Finn_?” Rey repeated.

“What?” said Phasma, wryly.  “He likes me.  He's sweet.  He's striking.  A wealthy widow’s as good as a virgin, they say.  I have a lot to offer him.”

“He’s your son’s age!  He's _—_ he's an ex-fugitive!”

“He's enterprising.  He took a risk.  I’m sure you’ll find a downside if you keep trying, dear.”

Rey opened her mouth to protest but couldn’t think of anything.  Ren crept around the side of the bar, crouched, the ball under his arm.

“ _I need the key to the priest’s room_ ,” he hissed.  She glanced down at him.

“ _What?_ ”

“ _The key.  Give it._ ”

His shirt stuck to him, drenched in sweat, chest heaving.  His sodden hair clung to the side of his face and fell around his large ears.  His neck was streaked with red from his exertion and his eyes were wild with near-madness.

She balked.  “ _What in God’s name are you—_ “

“ _I have no time for your_ ** _defiance,_** ” he snarled and stood suddenly.  He shoved his shoulder under her knees and the tavern turned upside-down as he threw her over his shoulder and bolted out the door.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Gameball was a real thing, although this is a very very small game of it. Think Calvinball with as many players as you could recruit. Ren gave more rules than would be usual.
> 
> They'd sometimes play between and through villages. As in, BETWEEN, miles away. Tournaments between knights were actually similar giant no-rules mob games, but with fighting and hostage-taking. People made a LOT of money at those. Ren specifies no hostages because he doesn't want anyone to pretend they thought this was a tournament.
> 
> Bridal color at this time could be anything, but blue was especially a color of "purity." White was not a specifically bridal thing.
> 
> Someone in the comments nailed it by mentioning the Wife of Bath from Canterbury Tales. She's an influence for both Marjorie and Phasma.


	5. Chapter 5

“You — will put —me — down!”

Her breath shuddered in her chest each step he took, smacking her chest and belly into his shoulders.  

He ignored her.  She tried twisting.  His right arm, the arm with the ball, was wrapped around her knees, and the other held tight her wrist, pulling her back level as she struggled.  All she could do was lift her head a little.  Rey saw the pace the cobblestones, and then the dirt road passed under her.

“O-o-oh!” she exclaimed.

“SHHH!”

From a rooftop came a whooping, ecstatic, incoherent exclamation.

“Mar-jorie!” shouted Rey in reply.

“Rey!  Rey!  Rey!  My love!” babbled Marjorie, overflowing with excitement.  Rey caught a glimpse of her standing on her rooftop arms at right angles, fists bobbing.

“HELP,” said Rey.

But Marjorie pulled a kerchief out of her sleeve pocket and waved it at her, rapturous, caught up in her own version of the moment.

“MAKE MEMORIES, MY LOVE,” she cried as Ren rounded the corner toward the back of the church grounds.

“FINN,” yelled Marjorie, just out of view, “Finn!  They went that way!”

Ren sped up, taking the last quarter mile to the church in a flat sprint.  Miller, standing goal line between the rye with Errol and two other men, spotted them and whooped.

The men stood shoulder to shoulder, waiting for Ren to try and break through the line.

Ren turned again and furled the church doors open, and a moment later Miller bellowed out to his compatriots.

“He’s in the church!”

"What's he carrying?" shouted Errol, but the men ignored him.

Ren scrambled to the back of the church, past the signs of the cross, past the cross, to the door in the right-back corner of the church: the door to the priest’s quarters and belfry.  

As he reached it, the front door of the church opened and the men ran in after them.  He dropped her onto her feet to free his hand, pulled the door open behind her, and went through, pushing her through with his chest.  She fell back against the stairwell wall.  He grabbed the broom Luke had kept at the base of the staircase and shoved the handle through the door handle and across the stone door frame.

He leaned against the door, panting, as it started to rattle.  The men on the other side hollered and pulled, but the door would not budge.  He twisted around to look at her under his chest, both palms still pressed against the door.  She was slid halfway down the wall, panting.

He noticed there was a turn-lock on the door and hurriedly bolted it.

The stairwell was dimly lit by little slit windows all up the side.  At the top of the stairs was the door to Luke’s quarters, now locked.

Rey had not opened the door since he’d died three days prior.

“I don’t— I don’t want to—“

“Give me the key,” he said.  He turned and held his hand out to her.  She swallowed.

“I will carry you up the stairs if I have to,” he said.  

She reached into her sleeve, into the pocket, and fished the key out.  She shakily pressed it into his palm.  He closed it around her hand.

“Come with me,” he said.

“I haven’t aired it out,” she said.  It would still be full of sickness. Her eyes darted between him and the top of the stairs. Her mouth trembled.

He shook his head and took a step forward.  She flattened herself against the wall.  He was massive.  His mouth was red, his breath ragged, his pupils wide.

“Are you afraid?”

She nodded.

He reached out and cupped her chin in his hand.

“It is not our time, my lady,” he said with conviction.

They heard more voices in the church as men from Ren’s team started pulling the opposing team away from the door.  The unmistakable noise of an all-out brawl banged and clattered and echoed in against the high church ceiling.

Rey wet her lips and glanced sideways, up the stairs, toward that place where she’d found Luke.  A week ago Sunday he refused to open his door.  She left him pottage on the stairs twice a day, and twice a day for four days left her an empty bowl.

But in the morning three days before, the food from the night before was untouched.  They did not bury him until that morning because so many more were sick.  No point in duplicating the labor.

The pestilence forced them to be that kind of practical.

“That’s where I found him, my lord,” she said.  “Please.”

He nodded, seeming to understand.  He watched her face.  He took in her grief, memorized it.  He turned it over in his mind like a precious object.  He pulled his hand away from her face and rubbed his palms together.

“What did you do when you found him?” he said.

“I-I sewed him into his bedsheets for his shroud.  I called the boys to carry down and burn his mattress.  We prayed.”

“Before that,” he said. “You didn’t do that straight away.  You couldn’t have.”

“How would you know?”

“I found my brother and his wife.  I know.”

She blinked away tears but did not cry.  He stared at her intensely, hungrily, incisively curious.

“I… I uh, I couldn’t look at his face.  I wanted to.  I couldn’t.”

“What did you do?” he said.

She looked up, breathing heavy.  She did not want to say, but it came out of her, haltingly, “I w-washed his feet.”

He paused.  The men still beat against the door behind them.

“‘So that he might not die?’” asked Ren gently.  “Exodus?”

She'd never planned to tell anyone, not in all her life.  Nobody would understand it, she was sure. It would not have even made sense to a priest.  It was her own private sacrament, an outward sign of an inward grace between her, Luke, and God.

She looked for judgment in Ren's face and did not find it.  She rubbed a tear from her cheek with the back of her hand.

“Were you afraid when you touched him?  Were you worried God would not protect you?”

“Yes,” she whispered.

"You had to anyway,” he said.

She nodded.

“I was right about you,” he breathed.

She blinked.  He looked her up and down, in her blue gown, damp across her chest and belly from his sweat.  She exhaled.

But then he turned and started walking up the stairs, with her in tow.  She tried to pull her hand away, but he ignored her.

She stared at the door as they approached it.   Every step echoed.  They finally reached the landing.

He tucked the ball under his arm, wrapped his fingers around her wrist, and pulled the key out.  He unlocked the door, shoved it open, and looked back at her white face, wide eyes, and locked knees.

He bent, wrapped her arm around his shoulder, and lifted her, carrying her inside like a bride to her bed.  The skin of his chest was hot even through his shirt and her gown.

He glanced around.  There was a bed frame, now bare, a wardrobe, and a book stand with a lovingly bound copy of the gospels displayed.  The stone wall next to the bed frame was lightly scratched and scored.

The room smelled faintly of sour blood and vomit.  They each held their breath.

At the other end of the room was yet another door.

“Is that the bell tower?” he asked, turning his head to her.

She nodded.  Their mouths were inches away.  He glanced down at her mouth and hurriedly looked away, back toward the door.  He stalked over and pulled it open, with some difficulty.  The fresher outside air hit them, and they breathed deeply.

It was not a large ‘tower,’ just a small covered balcony with a cast iron bell hung in the middle.  Ren walked around the bell, still holding her, and looked out over the edge.  Rey clung to his neck, her fingers balling into an anxious fist.

“I won’t drop you,” he muttered.  She saw him gaze across the land, and looked out where he looked.

The sun was hanging low in the sky, up late as it always was in summer.  The trees up on the hills past the fields of rye were a brilliant dark green.  The road wound down through them, between the golden grain, and down to the foot of the church, to the edge of the village, where Errol was the only person left guarding the goal line.

Guarding Errol was Finn.

Ren whistled, and Finn and Errol looked up.   Ren’s eyes met Finn’s.  Finn reached his hands up to his chest, fingers splayed and waiting.

Ren shifted Rey’s weight to one arm and tossed the ball off the side of the tower.  It bounced once and Finn caught it, sprinting.  Errol stood in front of him, but Finn hit him, full speed, and both rolled over the line.

The men in the church, having heard the whistle, burst out of the front church door in time to see Finn on the ground, the ball still in hand, across the goal line.  He sat up and held the ball over his head, triumphant.

“How many is that?” said Rey.

“Three to two.”

“Really?”  Rey rolled her eyes.  They were only halfway through.

“OIIIIIIII,” they heard a jubilant shriek from below.  Marjory ran into view, waving her kerchief.  She looked up at the bell tower, grinning manically.

“Please say dinner’s done!” called Rey.

“It’s done, love!”

Poe threw his hands up and wandered over to Finn to help him up.  He clapped him on the back.  Miller bent to whisper something kind, but no doubt stupid, to Errol.

“THANK YOU,” shouted Rey.  Ren winced at the volume.

“That was great!” called Marjorie.  “Off of the bell tower!  My daughter-in-law will be SO mad she missed it!”

“Let her watch next time,” called Rey.

Marjorie considered it, then cheerfully replied, “No!”

“What did she say?” said Ren.

“She says you win,” said Rey.  “Feast’s ready.”

He lifted his chin up, his mouth firm, and looked down like a proud tyrant.  Finn grinned up at him, pointed at him.  Ren nodded back then turned on his heel, marching back to victory.  He stopped at the doorway back to Luke’s quarters, hesitating.  

He turned his face to look at Rey again.  She swallowed.

“You can put me down,” she said.

“I think I’ve earned a taste.”

Her breathing quickened.  Her chest rose and fell as his did.  Same tempo.  In and out.

She looked into his eyes.  He was so close to them she had to look from one to another to focus on them.  They were golden in the sunlight, a little darker than the rye.

“The beer is in the tavern,” she said.

He nodded and leaned forward, eyes open, mouth parted.

When their lips touched, she did not pull away.


	6. Chapter 6

It was not a skillful kiss.  His lips were not tight or loose, but somewhere in-between.  Rey only knew from having seen passionate kisses but was no better herself.  She sucked in air between her teeth, past their lips, sunk her chest between her shoulders, and leaned into him, pressing her lips to his a little harder. 

The one thing that felt right was the small contact between their chests, his hand pressing her to her chest, the fingers of his other hand dug into her thigh through her gown.  She felt her blood rush to her face.

He pulled back.  He looked at her face, at her eyes and mouth.  He leaned forward again, jaw trembling a little, but he did not kiss her again.

“F-forgive me, lady.  I am….” he trailed off.

She nodded jerkily.

“Me too,” she said.

He put her down, suddenly, and took a step back.  He turned, rubbing his sweating hands on his hose.

“I would like that beer now,” he said.  He covered his face with his hand and walked back into Luke’s room.

Rey took a moment to gather herself before following him, mouth and nose covered.  He’d stopped by the bed frame to crouch and look at the scratches in the wall.  He pressed his hand against them, glanced up at her, and continued to the stairs.

Her curiosity overtook her fear.  She crept over to the bed and looked where Ren had gazed.

It was writing she had missed in the dim, pre-dawn light when she had found Luke.  It was faint but legible, in Latin.

**_There was a plague._ **

**_Shocking, fierce, violent_ **

**_We wretched survivors bear witness_ **

**_To the mighty wind thundering across the world_ **

— 

Then a line she did not quite understand— either “ _I pass through death into the peace of heaven_ ” or “ _suffer if you want to see yourself in heaven._ ”

—

**_All my love to you who remain_ **

**_1353_ **

She touched the graffiti, where Ren had touched it, and hurried out.  He waited at the stairs, a few steps down.

“Did you read it?” he asked.

She swallowed and nodded.  

“Have we been forsaken?” she asked.

He looked at her sharply, she looked away.  He wrapped his fingers around her shoulders, square with his until she’d look him in the eye.

“Never,” he said.

She looked away and nodded.  He clapped her shoulder.

“No more of this.  I won.  Beer now,” he said and turned, taking the steps two at a time.  She ran her palm across her eye and threw her head back, rolling her eyes at his posturing.  He pulled the broom out of the door handle, unbolted the door and threw it open, head thrown back.

Finn and Poe leaped on him through the door followed by six other men piling on top of him, all talking at once.

“You crazy monster son-of-a-bitch!” cried Finn.

“Relâchez-moi!”

Rey took the stairs carefully so as not to step on her sleeves.  Marjorie peeked into the door and up the stairwell, dodging the men’s flailing limbs.

“Are you married, love?” she said above the din.

“NO,” Rey hissed incredulously.

“Pity,” Marjorie looked her up and down, and at Ren thrashing on the floor, and her face fell when she realized Rey was not lying. She leaned back out without an additional word.

“Rey!” Ren shouted.  Ren kicked backward toward the wall as the men tried to lift him.

“ _Yes?_ ”

“ _I swear I will slaughter all of them if they keep touching me!  Robert!  George!  Where the hell are you?”_

She thought for a moment.

“ _I’ll go to a nunnery if you harm any of them. I’ll bring you a mug after your bath_ ,” she said.

“ ** _What_**?”

“He needs cooling off,” shouted Rey to the men above the din. “Into the river with all of you before supper.”

The men roared in consensus and hoisted him on their shoulders, indifferent or oblivious to his graphic gallic descriptions of the many deaths he planned for each of them.  They were out the church door before she made it all the way down.

They’d manage to splinter two pews in the front with their nonsense.  She caught herself wondering what Father Luke was going to say to them and scolded herself.

They were leaving the village for the Manor in the morning.  Luke had left.  It didn’t matter anymore.

—

Rey walked as quick as she could to the tavern.  In the middle distance, she heard French swearing and a massive splash and whoop as the men entered the cold river en masse.

Marjorie and Phasma stood outside, arms crossed.

“Have fun?” asked Phasma, accusing.

“I told you, nothing happened,” said Marjorie.

Phasma pointed at Rey.  “That’s not important.  People will assume something happened if you’re alone with him in a locked tower that long.”

“Why are you mad at _me_?”

“Because I don’t know enough French to yell at him,” said Phasma testily.

Robert and George peeked out from the tavern.

“I commandeered them to set the table so my daughter-in-law can take a break,” said Marjorie.  “I hope his lordship won’t mind.”

“ _Is everything all right?_ ” asked Robert.

“ _Sir Ren has soaked through his shirt and hose and is not presentable.  Do you have a spare?  I’ll bring it to the river.”_

Robert and George glanced at one another then at Marjorie, who gave them the same smile she gave her daughter-in-law.  Phasma’s gaze bore into them.

_“I, uh, yeah.  I, uh, picked up his surcoat when he shed it.  It’s still fresh.”_

_“Wonderful,”_ said Rey.

Rey followed them in and grabbed a clay mug from the back of the bar.  The men had carried her two finished kegs there.  She turned the stronger one, marked with chalk, on its side, shoved the cork in, and rolled it forward to pour a mug, and back again when it was full.

She thought a moment at how much he’d sweat and poured a second mug of the weaker draft.  It was so light it was close to water.   It tasted better than the water which ran off their fields into the well and river.

Robert and George pulled a white tablecloth over the long tables.  Rey transferred the second mug into her right hand and held out her left to Robert.  He nodded and picked the change of clothes off the bench, then handed them to her.

Rey walked back out, two mugs and change of clothes in hand.

“You look like a little wife,” called Marjorie after her.  “Are you _sure_ you didn’t take vows?”

“An alewife only,” insisted Rey.  “Help your _Robert_ set the table.”

“Oh, but I cooked all day.  I’m so tired.”

“Uh huh,” said Rey.

“Nobody respects my contributions,” said Marjorie to Phasma.

Phasma put her arm around Marjorie.  “Young women don’t know the burden of leadership.”

“So true.”

Rey wandered down to the river.  Most of the men had shed their clothes on the way in, but not all of them.  Finn had gone in fully clothed and had his arm around Ren, who splashed him violently.  Ren had shed at least his shirt and was waist-deep in the lazy river.  He lifted Finn up and threw him into the water.  Finn came up laughing.

“Qui est le prochain!?” he bellowed.  “ _Who’s next!?_ ”  He beat his chest and bent, arms wide, waiting for another challenger.

He was massive.   Broad-shouldered, white, and muscular, and very long limbed.  He had a few little lines on his chest and upper arms.  Across his shoulders was a fine network of little white scars, like cat-scratches.  Rey spotted a large, indented scar from his armpit down the side of his chest, as if an animal had taken a bite from him.

It was exactly the same place Rey had seen swell and fill with pus in half a dozen other people who had died, and one or two who had lived.

He stood up more out of the water, and she saw he had removed his breeches as well.  She averted her eyes to the sky and said.  “ _Oi_.”

The men stopped to look at her.  One or two started whistling.

“Like what you see?” hooted Poe.

“Knock it off,” she shouted.

The men glanced over at Ren, at his reaction, for a sign of embarrassment.  He was carefully blank-expressioned, but his ears, not hidden under his hair, burned red.  He saw their knowing glances and scowled.  He rolled his shoulders back and fished his shirt off the rock he’d thrown it onto, held it in front of his waist, and trudged out of the water toward her.  She carefully looked only at his face.  He loomed over her, water rolling off his hair and onto his shoulders.

“My lady,” he said tersely.

“Having fun?” she replied.

“Are _you_?  Having a good look at your options?” he said through his teeth, looming over her.  He passed his hand over the hair on his legs and down his arm to cast the water off of his skin.  A few cast-off drops fell onto her bodice and soaked through.

“I have brought my lord a drink and his clothes,” she said, firmly.

He glanced down at her hands.

“The stronger’s on the right,” she said.  “I thought you might want something a little lighter first.”

He snatched the left mug from her, threw his head back, and drank desperately.  He then took the second in hand and drank it, only a little more slowly.  It was stronger.  He held eye contact with her as he pulled it into his mouth.

He dropped both mugs onto the ground when he finished.  One bounced, the other shattered on a stone.   He looked down at her, panting.  Her breath caught in her throat.  She thought of him kissing her, again, in front of the men, and forgot to breathe.

She bent to pick up the mug, stooping as if to kneel in front of him.  Simultaneously the men whooped behind him and Ren took a step back.

“ _L-leave it,_ ” he said flushing.

She straightened, her cheeks burning.

“D-did I accidentally imply… something?”

“I won’t explain,” he said.

She leaned around him and shouted in English, “Oh, piss off!  All of you!”  she switched back to French.  “Come on.”

She grabbed him by the hand and started leading them away.

“My lady, my boots,” he said.

“Robert will get them.”

“They will think we—“

“They _already_ think that you idiot.  You kept me in that tower for a while.”

“Not _that_ long,” he said, incredulous.

“Marjorie says it doesn’t have to take long.  Says it’s a compliment.”

His mouth hung open for a moment. “ _That woman_ —“

“—Was my wet-nurse, so anything you say about her applies to _me_.  You be careful.”

His flush spread from his face down to his neck, from embarrassment or the alcohol starting to take hold.  His eyes widened.  He looked behind him.

The men were laughing at the spectacle.

She pulled him around the corner, to the disused barn which now housed his horse.  She handed him his clothes pointed him inside, and waited out of sight for him to get dressed.  She leaned, her shoulder against the open wooden door, arms crossed.

“I did not know she wet-nursed you,” he muttered.

“Is that a problem?”

“We do take on the character of what feeds us,” he said.

“Marjorie is a good woman.  She’s nursed a quarter of the people here.”

“No doubt.  They are a—“

“Careful!” she snarled.

“ _—passionate_ group,” he said.  “It explains a lot.”

“Honestly, if you’re just going to insult me—“

He stepped out of the barn, pulling his surcoat around his shoulders.  He fastened the hook and eye at his chest.

“I would not,” he said.  He took one step forward, and she called his bluff.  He would not take another.

However, he did.  Her shoulders tensed.  She made to take another step back, but his hand snaked forward, his fingers hooking into the lacing at the front of her bodice.

“Sir,” she said.

“ _My_ lady.”

“You would not dishonor me, sir.”

“As far as all are concerned, you are already my wife,” he said.  “I cannot dishonor you.”

“I am _not_ your wife.  And they don’t think I am your wife.  They think I’m your whore.”

“You could be both,” he said.

Her breath jerked out in an incredulous imitation of a laugh.  “You can’t be drunk already,” she said.

He gazed down at her.  He slowly, lazily almost, pulled the knot loose at the top of her kirtle.  He yanked on the laces.  The top two eyelets came apart.  She blinked.

“We could say the words now,” he said.

“That is not legal,” she said.  “There needs to be a priest.  Witnesses.  We need to give notice.”

“The Church recognizes private vows seriously made,” he said.  “Those things are not essential.  Only consumation is essential.”

She stepped back, and her laces slipped from another set of loops.  She pulled her elbows in as the top of her garment started to gape over her long-sleeved, somewhat sheer blouse.

“ _No_.  No.  They follow Aquinas in requiring consent,” she said.

He froze.  “ _You_ have read Aquinas?”

She opened her mouth, incredulous.  His expression melted from feral, naked need to very cautious enthusiasm.

“ _That_ is what you seize on from this?  _That!_?”

He untangled his fingers from her lacing.  “Have you read the Philosopher as well?” he said.

“A-a little.  Why—“

He seized her by the head and kissed her, roughly, on the forehead.  He looked down into her eyes.

“We’ll have witnesses and— and a priest if we can find one.  But quickly, all right?  I won’t post an announcement.  If anyone has an objection, they can go to hell.  Will you have me?” he said.

He looked strangely concerned.  He glanced down at her bodice and winced a little.  She crossed her arms over her chest.

“I don’t think I will ever fully understand your mind,” she said.

The corners of his mouth turned up a little, before looking at her face.  For a fraction of a second, he looked hurt.

She found, to her surprise, that she gave a damn.

She wrapped her fingers around his wrists, elbows still pressed together to cover herself.

“I will try my best,” she said.

“I will not disappoint you,” he said and let her go.  He stepped back and finished closing his jacket as if nothing at all had happened.

She walked around him, into the barn, to re-do her lacing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The graffiti on the wall is very similar to one or two pieces of graffiti left on St. Mary's Church in Ashwell.
> 
> The line Rey can't translate is "Praetereo fini tempori in cello pace," and both her interpretations are correct.
> 
> Modesty didn't have a whole lot to do with nudity, but more to do with being inappropriate than with nudity. Ren being nude while bathing was appropriate for what he was doing. It's therefore not really obscene he'd be nude in front of a woman. More awkward.
> 
> The medieval theory of disease involved impurity. Sin or virtue wasn't just something people did, it could be smelled or absorbed if touched. If you touched something or ate something or smelled something, you would take on its nature.
> 
> For that reason, kids who wet-nursed at the same breast were considered like siblings, and might be thought of as more "related" to their wet-nurse and their milk siblings than their own parents and biological siblings. They had the same nature.
> 
> It was VERY frowned upon to marry without a priest or witnesses or soliciting objections, but it was de-facto legal. A marriage with only consent and consumation technically met all of the theological requirements at the time. They had to fix that at the Council of Trent in the 1500s.
> 
> So Ren, uh, got his courage up to propose, and did. In his own way. Yeah, that's the ticket.


	7. Chapter 7

The horses, roped into their stalls, peered at Rey.  The white one, Ren's, shook off a fly.  Rey had an impulse, a momentary image of mounting her and riding away.  Rey did not know where they would go.  That would be a problem.  An inexperienced and completely absent rider might convince the horse, however initially obedient, that the horse knew what was best.  What was best for the horse, who knew nothing better, would be to find Ren.

The fly bumbled into Rey's face, and she swatted it away.  She crept out of the barn and hung back, peeking around the corner.

She peeked out of the barn.  Ren had wandered off, no doubt to find his boots.  This was confirmed to her by the chorus of "whoooooahs" and splashing noises down the path and just out of sight.

The ruckus drove Ren back down the road toward Rey until he'd was out of view from them, one boot off and the other in hand.  He glanced around.  He did not spot her.  His shoulders dropped and he bent, pressing his hands into his face then rubbing his knuckles across the small of his back.  His face looked a little older as he permitted the aches of the ride and the day to seep through his expression, He bent to put the other shoe on and winced, too stiff to comfortably bend.

He hopped as he shoved his foot into the second pointed boot.  He bent to tie them, straightened up, and ran his hands through his hair to push it out of his face.  It was drying wavier than Rey had seen it.  He ran his hand over his face and chin.  It was the fashion for men to be clean-shaven.  He was checking for stubble.

"Vanity is a sin," she said.

He reeled, hand on his hip for a sword he was not carrying.  He saw her and, after a moment, did not so much relax as discount her as that kind of threat.  He was still cautious, suspicious of why she renewed the topic.

"Virtue," he ventured, "is the mean of two extremes.  I shouldn’t neglect my appearance.  My pride is appropriate.  It is exactly as it should be.”

“‘Proper pride’ is a concept from the Philosopher. Aquinas only values humility before God.”

He nodded.  He studied her, unsure.  "The Philosopher did not know Christ."

She shrugged.  “I think the Philosopher is more consistent anyway.  Even if he did not account for devotion.  If God gave man reason, and The Philosopher is more reasonable, he is closer to God.”

“God gave _man_ reason.”

She rolled her eyes and turned away from him.

“I agree with you,” he spat out.  She sighed and turned back.  His eyes were pointed at the ground, like a scolded child.

"Why did you have me legitimized?" she said.

He glanced up at her.  ”I don't follow."

“We’re on the topic of right pride.  Right reason.  Let’s talk right place.  God’s communicated intent to us.”

“All right.”

“I was put in my proper place by my Maker.  I am a serf and a woman.  That’s my place.”

He passed his tongue over his lower teeth under his lips and crossed his arms.  He took sudden interest in the rocks embedded in the dirt path beneath his feet, toeing them.

“Your proper place is with me.”

“God intended me to be this way.”

"Then He was wrong."

She swallowed.  ”Sir.  I—“

He freed a clod of harder clay from the dirt road below him and kicked it, hard, shattering it.  He stalked up to her.  His fingers clenched and unclenched in front of him, but he did not grab her.  He restrained himself.

"He permitted Jacob to wrestle with Him and still favored him, I think He will permit it of me without withdrawing His favor.  If He argued with Moses and Lot, made them concessions, why not me?  If He gave me His Son, why not give me you?"

"God does not owe us anything."

"I will still wrestle with Him on this.  I will win.  If He made me a fighter, then He wants me to fight.  It is in my nature.”

“It is.”

“And yours.”

“I’m nothing like you.”

He laughed, once, tension draining from his face.  Not a hint malice behind it.  He stalked past her.

Rey’s mouth dropped.  Her pulse rang in her ears.

It was worse than if he’d contradicted her.  

So much worse.

It took the sight of the men wandering back from the river to shake her out of her frozen, outraged torpor.

Finn and Poe’s shirts clung to them.  They each caught her look and immediately dropped their smiles.  Finn hushed the other men.

“You all right?” said Poe.

She made an effort to unclench.  She was somewhat successful.  “Honestly, I don’t know.”

 Poe offered her his arm.   Finn offered her his arm on her other side.  She snorted and took them both.

“You know, I’ve been thinking about your uh, situation.”

“We have,” corrected Finn.

“Yeah.  You know, we can find another way.”

“Huh?” she said.

“Like, a serf and a lord.  It’s, uh, well, I don’t want to tell you your business.  But we have your back.”  He patted her on the arm.

“We’ll find our own ways, you know? We'll be fine.” said Finn.

She looked at each of them.  Errol and Miller passed around them.  Miller jabbed Errol in the ribs, and Errol glanced at him in maudlin betrayal.  One or two men behind them laughed.

“Knock it off,” said Poe.

“I’m fine,” said Errol.

They walked through the thin line of trees between the river and the village proper.  Her home.  She imagined them all going their own ways, trying to find new work.  Some might go to the manor, even at the same wage.  

Most would not.

She would not see some of them again.  Even in good times, life was unpredictable.  Some people could catch a cough and be fine in three days, and for no reason she could divine others would be dead.  Travel was expensive.  If the villagers split up, without a doubt, that would be the last she’d see of many of them.

“I’m not a serf,” she said, absently.

“Hm?”

“Turns out I’m a lady.  Sir Ren is my father’s cousin.  I’m not even a bastard.”

Poe and Finn dropped her arms as if she’d turned white-hot.

“ _What_?” said Poe.

Miller stopped and turned.  “Wait, _what_?”

“What’s going on?” said Errol.

“Why didn’t you tell us?” said Finn.

“I didn’t know until this morning.”

“So wait, you and, uh, Sir Ren…?” said Poe.

She threw her hands up, to her side, waved them in front of her, threw them down again.

“I… yeah.  Yeah.  He asked for my hand. I said ‘yeah.’”

“…’ _Yeah_?’” said Poe.

“How do you feel about that?” said Errol, worried.

“I’m.  Just.  _Thrilled_.”

“It seems like you hate him,” said Finn.

Miller screwed his face up, peered at her through one eye and shook his finger at her.  “That’s not hate,” he said sagely.  “My first wife was like that.  And come to think of it, my second when I got her going.  I have stories.”

Poe started walking again, around Miller, and Finn and Rey followed.

“Oh, come on, they’re no worse than Phasma’s.”

“Phasma’s book doesn’t have your disgusting trick knee in it,” said Rey.  They and the rest of the men hurried away toward the feast, leaving Errol and Miller.  Miller looked over and up at the tall boy.

“My right knee bends backwards,” said Miller.  “I had an accident.”

Errol’s face became very still.  His eyebrows crept up, in subtle delighted terror.  “… _Really_?”

—

Ren was already in the tavern, seated at the head of one of the long tables with another mug in front of him.  The lambs were dressed and on the bar top along with the other dishes, ready to be served.  The women, with their younger sons and daughters and one very elderly and very deaf man, lined up along the edges of the hall, waiting.

Three full long tables were covered with white cloth.  Phasma had laid out the mugs of beer and clay pitchers toward the center so people could serve themselves without bothering her.  Most people would have and bring their own eating knives, but for the forgetful or the temporarily embarrassed, she laid out a few extra in the center of the table.

Ren stood as Rey entered, threw his chin up.  He held out his left hand to his side.  She curtsied to him and, ignoring the villager’s looks, sat.  Poe followed Rey and chose a seat on the bench near to her, but not too near, on Ren’s right side.  Finn flitted around the edge of the hall until he found Marjorie.  He looked surprised she was not surprised.

“ _What do you mean_ ‘old news’?” she heard him say.  Other people started muttering and staking out their seating arrangement.  Poe reserved a seat for Finn.  Miller tried to sit next to Rey.

“Taken, I’m afraid,” she said.

“No it’s not,” said Miller.

“You can fight Phasma for it,” said Rey.

Rey and Ren each stared at him.  Neither blinked.

Miller chose another table.

Phasma, Marjorie, her daughter-in-law, and Ren’s soldiers hung back, and once everyone was seated, started their service.

Services at the manor would be elaborate, multi-course affairs, served as the meal was cooked.  This was served all at once, with the bread pudding held back for last so the children and less mature men would not grab great fistfuls first and leave none for the adults.

Phasma had broken out the candles, enough to give the place a warm, cheery glow even as the sun began to set outside.  Light danced across Ren’s stony face and caught it at interesting angles.  His skin glowed from within.  He caught her eye and looked at her as if he expected her to say something.  She picked up her mug to avoid his gaze.

Marjorie had pulled out all the stops she could manage on short notice.  She and the others serving toted chickens, the lambs, little marrow pies, oat-stuffed sausage, aspic, and pottage.  Large crusty loaves of bread went directly onto the tablecloth, and no sooner rested on it than villagers started to tear into it.

But not at Ren’s table.  Nobody there ate before Ren, and Ren took no food.  He waited for Marjorie and Phasma to light next to Rey, and his men next to him before breaking the bread and taking it for himself.  He pulled his dinner knife from his belt from an elaborately embossed leather sheath and cut himself a hunk of lamb.  He ate it with his fingers fat and all.

“Oh, all right,” said Marjorie approvingly.

He glanced up at her and kept his face very still.  He washed the lamb down with beer.

“You’re awfully quiet,” said Rey to Ren.

“I have nothing to say,” he said.

“I’ve decided to marry.”

He raised his eyebrows.

“I thought that was settled.”

“You would.”

He put his mug down heavily.

“I am very tired,” he said.  “I rode all night.  I had another beer when I got back here.  I don’t talk when I drink.”

“Fine.  I’ll leave you to your meal,” she said.

She glanced over at him.

“Thank you,” he said.

She waved him off and turned to speak to Phasma.  Phasma was engrossed in conversation with Finn, seated next to her.  She straddled the bench to face him.  He had his arm crossed over his body, but he leaned in.  He said something not very funny, and Phasma pushed his shoulder playfully.

He looked worried but pleased she liked the joke.

She glanced back at Ren to see if he was also watching, but he hadn’t followed her gaze.  He was looking at her.

“I mean,” said Ren, “Thank you for consenting.  It’s not what you wanted for your life.”

“Or you yours, I’d bet,” she said, tearing off a piece of bread and throwing it into her mouth.

“I’m content,” he said.

“Please.  You wanted to be a priest.”

“I’m a knight.”

“ _You_ wanted to be a priest.  You’ve read so much theology you can’t stop quoting it.”

He ran his hand through his hair.  He cracked his neck.  He was too tired to argue and too tipsy to stay quiet or still.  He finished his mug and poured himself another.

“I wanted to be a templar.” he said.

“Why didn’t you?”

“They were disbanded a decade before I was born,” he said.

“That would be a problem.  You can still go be a priest.  You’re getting old for a knight anyway.”

“It’d be awfully hard to make little lords or ladies,” he curled his lips around it as a mildly disgusting joke, “if I’m supposed to be celibate.”

“Didn’t stop Father Luke.”

He frowned and slowly blinked in assent.

“Do you feel called to the priesthood?”

“Yes.”

Rey took her little dinner knife and stabbed at the lamb, harder than she meant to.  Marjorie watched her with great interest.

“Sorry,” she said to Marjorie.

“You’re angry,” Ren said.

“Me?  No,” she said, hacking at a bone.

“It’s already dead, dear,” said Marjorie brightly.  Rey ignored her.  Marjorie sat back for the show, leaning against Phasma, who was not attentive to it.

“Perhaps I believe you should not waste God’s calling for you.  Maybe it’s upsetting to see.”

“You don’t like me that well yet.  You wouldn’t be angry at my wasted potential.”

“I have principles,” she said, stiffly. “I think you’re ignoring your calling.”

He pointed his knife at her.  “You think I’m ignoring _your_ calling,” he said, grinning wolfishly.

She sat up straight and looked around the table.  Marjorie had lost interest and was watching Phasma and Finn.  George and Robert were speaking to one another.

Nobody was looking at her.  Her breathing became labored.

“Sir, I—“

“‘Sir,’ ‘sir.’” he said, imitating her.  “You always call me ‘sir,’ when you lie to me.  It’s endearing.  Truly.  _You’re_ not reading _Aristotle_ because you want to be an _alewife_.  _You_ want to be a priest.  _You_ covet _men_.  You even _walk_ like you have a cock.” she flinched at the word, he laughed at her blushing.

He continued, “God made man in his own image, with reason, and woman in man’s image, a copy of a copy.”  He put his knife down carefully so he could point with his finger closer to her face.  “ _You’re_ no man’s rib.  Men with half your wit excel in the church, and women are forgotten.  _I_ wouldn’t be content in your position, why would you?  And for you, that is appropriate pride.  That is virtue.”  

She put her hand over his finger and lowered it to the table so he would make less of a scene.  He grinned and looked at her mouth, leaning forward, openly pleased with the fight and with her hand on his.

“I am _not_ a man,” she hissed.  “I do not want to be a man.”

“You wanted to be a priest.  Just as you are.  Just have people forget your sex.  Not mention it or notice it.  Respect you for your mind.”

She glanced around, leaned in, and hissed, furious,  “ _Yes_.”

He slapped the table with his free hand, victorious, then put it over hers.  “I like that about you.”

“What?”

“All of it.”  

She took a moment to decide if she was gravely insulted or flattered.

It was definitely both.

“Thank you?” she said, managing to put both feelings into her inflection.

He panted and frowned as his brain caught up with his mouth.  He looked down at his mug.   She moved it away from him, carefully freed her trapped hand, and tore him off another piece of bread.

He ate it silently and became slowly more miserable about how much he’d said.

“I did tell you it was strong.  _And_ you started on an empty stomach,” she said.

Ren folded his arms and put his head down.  George noticed and stood, putting his hand on his lord’s shoulder.  Ren waved him off.  Ren was soon asleep.  Rey turned to her other dinner companions.

Marjorie noticed Rey’s return to the rest of the feast first and smiled.  She spotted Ren next and elbowed Phasma.  Both women grinned.

“That’s how you know this is going to be a good night,” said Phasma.  “One down already.”

Ren slept through the pudding.  Rey permitted herself a break and chatted comfortably with her neighbors, and a little less comfortably with Robert and George.  Marjorie had done her work well, and Robert eyed her nervously as he got more intoxicated.

None of the rest of the serfs woke Ren because, as a huge man and a lord, nobody could object if he took a large portion.  With him asleep, they ate his.

Poe, finished, retrieved the lute from the bar along with Phasma’s book, which he handed to her.  He started tuning the instrument.  Marjorie slowly lit up.

“Music with our story, you are brilliant,” she cried.  He smiled at her.  Poe could look sheepish and utterly confident in the same look.  She turned to Rey.  “Wake him, honey.”

Rey glanced down at him.  “He’s really spent.”

“This is worth missing some sleep over.”

Phasma looked through her book for the story she wanted to share.  She showed an illustration to Poe in the margins, a flying phallus.  He laughed and nodded.

“I don’t want to translate this to him,” Rey said.

“Oh, you’re such a maid," purred Marjorie. "No fear, I’ll do it!”

“Wait, what?”

“Mon seigneur!” said Marjorie, in heavily accented but understandable French.  She frowned when he didn’t respond, stood, marched over to him and poked him in the ribs.

“Écoutez!”

He lifted his head, disoriented.

“C’est l’heure d’une histoire!” Marjorie said.

“ _You speak French!_?” said Rey.

Ren looked at Marjorie’s face, then at Rey’s, and back, and it slowly dawned on him he would have to speak to Marjorie.

“Jesus wept,” he muttered.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Rey and Ren are arguing about Aristotle's virtues in the Nicomachean Ethics versus Aquinas's concept of ethics. They're both kind of ballsy in admitting they prefer Aristotle's version.
> 
> Masculinity and femininity: the church spent a lot of time as the middle ages wore on emphasizing that women weren't in the image of God. Ren is on the cutting edge of that thinking. However, it was not a time when you turned down skilled labor whether it came from a woman or a man. Hence, why the church spent so much time condemning women. How would anyone know women were inferior if you just paid attention to what they did and said?
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
> God's nature was thought to be supremely logical. Reason was supposed to flow from God, and since man was in God's image, and women made as an inferior copy of men, then reason was masculine and women weren't supposed to be any good at it. Women were supposed to be more sexual and impulsive.
> 
> So Rey, when she's even the least bit smart, is being "mannish." Which Ren, uh, doesn't mind?
> 
> Please note I do not endorse his line of thinking.


	8. Chapter 8

“You should watch your language around your lady love.” said Marjorie.

Ren stared at her.

“Marjorie, you did not tell me you spoke French,” said Rey in English.

“It’s not come up, dear,” said Marjorie in French.  Rey scowled at her.  Marjorie said “Oh, you know it would be rude to exclude Sir Ren from the conversation.  We must not talk about him as if he is not here.”

“As you are now,” said Ren.

“Yes,” said Marjorie, smiling.

“I think we’re making a scene,” said Rey.

“Oh?”  Marjorie switched to English.

“Phasma, which story is it?”

“The Lady of Carrick.”

Marjorie clapped her hands, delighted.  “La Dame du Carrick, ah, bon!” she waved at Robert on the other side of the table.

“You will like this one, Sir Robert.   Sit with me for it, I will make sure you hear it well!”

Robert glanced at Ren, who gave him a warning look.  Robert looked between them and, wincing apologetically, decided something in Marjorie’s smile, though more subtle, was a little more dangerous than Ren’s glare.  He stood.

As he made his way around the table, Ren hissed at her, “You have no shame.”

Marjorie turned to Rey,  “He’s _very_ sharp!”

“I will forbid it,” said Ren.

“Do you find forbidden things less tempting, sir?” she said brightly, glancing between him and Rey.  “He thinks the only way to make someone do something is by shouting.  We’ll help him, won’t we, dear?”

Rey, to her own surprise, felt her cheeks burn red, embarrassed and furious.

“That’s enough,” she said.

Marjorie glanced, hurt, at Rey for taking his side.  Rey avoided Ren’s gaze, but felt it on her.  Phasma scooted down for Robert, and he sat between the two women.  He bumped into Phasma and she gave him a tight smile and a look up and down her body as he pardoned himself.

George took in the scene and, apparently deciding he wanted no part of it, wandered over to the bar, near Poe.

Finn, across the table and unable to understand the conversation, glanced between Robert and Phasma and shifted uncomfortably.  Phasma caught this and smiled brightly at him.  He pressed his lips together between his teeth, bashful, and poured himself the last of the pitcher of beer into his mug.

Poe finished tuning his lute and began to lightly pick at it.  Phasma cleared her throat.  Miller heard this and started to hush the people next to him, and the hushing spread to the edge of the hall until everyone was silent.  Eudora Smith’s baby started to cry, and she and her husband stood at the edge of the hall, her bouncing the child on her hip.  Her husband leaned against the wall and kissed Eudora on the forehead.

Phasma met Finn’s eye, and began, quietly, with a playful, witty voice.  Marjorie translated, starting bright and matter-of-fact.

“The lady of Carrick in Scotland was a countess in her own right, orphaned at three.  While she was a Countess, her body and her property were the King’s to give away at his pleasure, like a prize for his best men.  No open case was made in court for what was hers.  It was all back-room muttering, without her knowledge, and one day, she was told.  Being young, she was afraid.

Phasma gave a dramatic pause to allow her audience to feel the tension.  Marjorie faced Ren and Rey, straddling the bench, staring at Ren.  She leaned behind her to Robert.

“Oh, don’t be prude, lean in, honey,” she said.  She pulled his hands around her waist.  He swallowed and glanced up in terror at Ren.  

Phasma ignored them.  Between sentences, she looked up at Finn and he glanced between his hands and her.

“And so, she was given by the King and taken at fourteen by his loyal servant and veteran of the Eighth Crusade, Adam of Kilconquhar, twenty years her senior.  It was a happy marriage; the Lady was left to run her castle, and Sir Kilconquhar joined the Ninth Crusade, and that, rather than any prowess Sir Adam possessed, was the secret to each of their happiness.

“She learned to hunt with sword and bow, and took parties with her into the woods, her woods, her great unknown at the foot of her great castle, hers and only hers as long as her elder lord was away.  She took with her a bow and dagger to hunt a stag, and she found her one: the finest she had ever seen, golden brown, antlers proud as any tree.

“Her party of young maids and gentlemen, ever loyal to her, kept their horses silent as they sat downwind and she slowly, quietly, meditatively notched her arrow.

“She, a practiced hunter, pulled the arrow to her cheek atop her horse, aiming for the stag’s heart.  She would, as she had before, pierce it between the ribs, follow it for hours or, if need be, days until it fell. She would dispatch it finally with a dagger and leave it for the men to clean and the maids to put it on her table.

But that did not happen.  Someone, behind her party, snapped a twig underfoot, and as she loosed her arrow, the stag ran, unscathed.

“She turned to see who had ruined her great chance and saw a young man, her age, knelt in the brush, the crown of his dark--"

Rey interjected to Ren,  "-- Phasma did _not_ say dark, she said bright--"

"shh!—“ said Phasma and Marjorie,  “—hair lit by the dappled forest light.  On his black—“

"WHITE,” said Rey.

“—surcoat was a red cross.  She felt her heart leap, and she knew why he was there.  All of why, in an instant."

“’My Lady,' said he, 'forgive me, but it is a grave matter.'

“’Where will I find me another stag?' said she.

“He lifted his face to her, and it was the finest she had ever seen or ever would again.

“’Your husband, my commander, is dead at Acre,' the young soldier said.

“Her ladies gasped for her, and while she was not unmoved, she felt a greater pang: she was once again a man's to give away and take as he pleased, and not as she did.  But what she saw before her pleased her indeed.

“’And who are you?' she said.

“’Robert de Bruce,' he replied.”

Marjorie ran her hands over Robert’s, pressing them up her bodice.  He no longer met Ren’s gaze.  He turned to straddle the bench behind her, resting his head on Marjorie’s shoulder.

“’Join us on our hunt, Sir Bruce,' she said, leaning forward in her saddle.

“’I fear I must return,' said he. 'I am called back to battle.'

“She pulled her dagger from her belt and pointed it at him, and her ladies, knowing her heart, pulled their horses around him, followed a moment by her men.  The young Robert wheeled around, finding himself trapped.

“’My lady, am I a prisoner?  For ruining the hunt?'

“’On the contrary, you have made my hunt a success.  You are a most distinguished guest.  You are surely weary of the fight.  Rest with me.'

“He crouched under her horse to run, and run he did, through the forest, and to a cliffside, where the horses once again cut off his escape.   the countess brought her horse aside him, at the edge, and he grabbed onto it so as not to fall.  She pulled him by the shoulders across her horse's neck, and rode quickly back to the castle.

“There, for ten days, he stayed.  He was provided comfortable room in the great castle, the run of it, but not permitted to leave through its gates or to go outside his room at night.  He took meals with the court.  He was sat at the Countess's table, but she would not speak to him.  She spoke only to her ladies, wrapped her delicate mouth around fruit and roasted meat, and showed her white throat as she laughed.

“And slowly, as he enjoyed the sweet night air in the gardens and her soft laughter at meals and the taste of fruit in his mouth, he allowed his resentment to soften.  And his mind began to wonder what her skin felt like under his coarse hands, whether the fruit and meat she ate could be tasted in the sweat between her legs.  He found, at night, he could not shake the vision of her, although he prayed it might be taken from him.

Marjorie sighed and leaned backward into Robert, her hips firmly against his now.  Phasma glanced up.  Finn did not look away.  Phasma had been unmoved by the book she had read many times before, but she was visibly surprised Finn would meet her gaze.  She glanced down as her cheeks flushed.

Rey did not want to look at Ren.  She glanced over, forcing herself.  He was staring at the table, eyes unfocused, into the middle distance, but once she turned her head he turned his to her.  She immediately looked away and felt her face burn red.

She hoped it did not show in the dim light.

“Two nights hence,” continued Phasma and Marjorie, “he heard a rapping on his door and did not answer.  The third night, he went to the door, pressed his hand against it, knowing what was on the other side for him.  The fourteenth night of his capture, he opened the chamber door.  His guards had vanished, and there was the lady of the castle.

“Had he wanted to, he could have run.  Alone, he could have easily overpowered her.   But instead he allowed her to press past him, through the door.  She shut and bolt it behind her, leaned against it, in her velvet gown, her hair braided into golden nets, her pale breast heaving over the top of her bodice.

“’How long am I to be your guest?' said he.

“’The door,' she said, 'is sturdy, and bolted with a firm lock.  My ladies are in their beds, and my men as well.  This castle is mine, and I keep my own council," said she.  "But my body I will give to you, to take your pleasure as you will, and if you give me mine I am yours.

“He could bear it no longer.  They did not make it to his bed, but stripped her there, by the door, and took her against it, in her velvet gown, and only then again, on the bed.  They did not rest that night and found the passion they had kindled only grew with each coupling.  By the morning, in the throes of extasy, they had, again and again, vowed to be man and wife, and they stepped out into the morning sun and out of the castle gates as such.

“The King was furious, and the couple was fined, but none challenged the match, for, despite the study door and firm lock, few had not heard their cries of passion.  From her defiance and his lust, from the great furnace of their sin, Lady Marjorie of Carrick and Lord Robert de Bruce produced the pretender King, Robert the Bruce of Scotland.  

“But that is another story.”

Phasma closed her book and glanced around the room.  The candles had begun to burn low, and one or two unattached young people had fallen into a tipsy slumber.  The Smiths had long quieted their baby and were holding one another in the corner, rocking back and forth in their own little world.

After a short pause, the people began to murmur again.  Marjorie stood, Robert’s hand in hers, and without another word led him out the back door of the tavern.

Finn was bolt-upright, looking at Phasma.  She finally met his gaze and smiled.  He looked around nervously and leaned in.

"Could I have a word?" he said.

"Of course."

"Outside?"

She pursed her lips and worry flit across her face for just a moment.  She glanced over at Rey, who gave her a tight smile, and rose, book in hand.  Finn didn’t look at her, he walked to the front tavern door and opened it for her, allowing her to go first.  Phasma glanced back again at Rey and went outside.

Rey exhaled.

“Well, that was, uh,” she said.

Ren’s fists were balled up and dug into his thighs.  He stared off, as he had been, into the distance.

“Don’t let her get to you.  She thinks you’re bothered by being, uh,” she glanced around for George; he was not in earshot.  “A virgin,” said Rey.

His head snapped up to look at her.

“That is not the case,” he said.   His chest moved below his tunic.

“O-of course not,” she said, not believing him but trying to appease him off the topic.

“I am not ashamed of it.  I am one,” he said.  “I have stayed celibate.  As have you, I have no doubt, although that is harder for your sex.”

She swallowed and nodded.

“The highest thing to be would be a bishop.  It is better not to marry,” he said.

“I-I know.”

He looked at her, his breathing coarse.  His lips were red.  He ran his lower teeth over his top lip.

“My lady,” he said.  “I—“

But he was interrupted by a shrieking out the back door of the tavern.  Marjorie burst in, Robert in tow, both fully clothed and Robert very annoyed.

“OI,” she said.

“Oh, what is it?” spat Ren.

Marjorie ignored him.  “TO THE CHURCH,” she said.

“What?” said Poe.

“They’re trying to do it in private, blast them!  Let’s give them witnesses!”

Poe’s face turned first from shock and then to glee.  He took his lute off him and ran out the door first, followed by Miller and the other nosiest villagers.

“What is going on?” said Ren.

“I think Phasma and Finn are marrying.”

“ _What_?” he said.

“They, uh, like each other?”

“But she’s a respectable proprietress.  He’s a criminal.”

Rey opened her mouth, shrugged, “It makes sense to them.”

Realizing they’d soon be the only people left in the tavern and not wanting to miss it entirely, she stood and started walking.  She was out the tavern door before she heard Ren’s chair  screech as he pushed it back, and he jogged up next to her.  They walked a few paces side by side.  He held his arm out.

After a moment of trepidation, she took it.  She looked straight ahead.

Before long, they were at the edge of the very small crowd.  Phasma stood, in the church door to Finn’s left.  Phasma was smiling, wiping tears away from her eyes.  Finn beamed.  Phasma spotted Rey.

“There’s my bridesmaid!” said Phasma.

“You waited?” said Rey.

“No,” said Finn.

“Ohhh!” said Marjorie.  “At least kiss again!”

Phasma laughed hard, through her tears, and bent her knees to kiss her shorter groom.  She put her hands on either side of his face and pressed her lips against his in a sweet, chaste kiss.

He looked into her eyes and shook his head at her, grinning.  He ran his fingers up her arms.  “Oh, no,” he said.  He leaned in again tilted his head, and kissed her, delicately at first, but pressing soon into an insistent, open mouthed kiss that seemed to shock even experienced Phasma.  She pressed her veil back against her head as she leaned in, and pulled away because she had lost her breath.

Phasma looked back over the crowd and said, sheepishly, “Well.  Good night everyone!”

She grabbed Finn by the hand and they ran back toward the tavern, hand in hand, Phasma holding her veil against her head and laughing.  Most of the villagers hooted and ran after them.  A few, including the Smiths and their little child, hung back a minute to look at the church in the moonlight.

And soon Rey and Ren were alone, arm in arm.  She looked up at him.  He was already looking at her.

“Is it time?” he said.  His eyebrows were a little raised, his face relaxed.

She did not ask him what he meant.  Her lips parted.  She nodded.

They walked up the steps and stood in the door.  He ran his hand down the inside of her arm and entwined his fingers in hers.  The hair on the back of her arms stood up.

She knew then she was his.

“I,” he said, his voice shook.  He took a breath and started again.  “I, Sir Kylo Ren,” she realized she had never heard his first name and winced.  He stopped again also wincing, then started, “take you, Rey Skywalker, to be my wedded wife, for richer and poorer, in sickness and in health, to— to love and cherish, until death parts us.  By God’s holy ordinance, I make this sacred commitment.”

Rey found her breath speeding to match his.  “I— I, Rey Skywalker, take you, Kylo Ren, to be my wedded husband, for richer or poorer, to be—“ the words were different for her here, “to be uh, compliant in bed and board, to uh, uh, uh,” she said, her breath catching.

“Till death,” he prompted.  She nodded.

“”— till death do us part, I make this sacred commitment,” she said.

And no sooner had she said it than he reached and roughly pulled her to him, his mouth on hers, their fingers still tightly entwined.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Marjorie Carrick and Robert de Bruce were real people, and she really did abduct him, and they really did produce Robert the Bruce. However, my re-telling is a thinly veiled raunchy story masquerading as a patriotic English morality tale.
> 
> There are flying pensies in the margin because they thought it was funny to draw penises in the margins of books. And they were right!
> 
>  


	9. Chapter 9

This time the kiss was better.

His arm bent around her head, cradling it, pulling her up onto her toes.  He rested their hands, his and hers, on the bent crook of her hip.

It was right and terrifying.  She exhaled and pulled away, and as she did, he bent and embraced her.  He rested his head on her chin.

“Where do we go?” he said.  He squeezed her hand.  It was not reassuring.  Her heart beat faster.  She shifted her hips; something between her legs was uncomfortable.

The crowd from Finn and Phasma’s wedding was still raucous, even as far away as the tavern.

“It’s— it’s across town,” she panted.

He pulled back from her, bent, face to face.

“Would we be seen?”

She winced, and he tightened his lips across his face.  He looked outward, steeling himself for their walk.

That was not what Rey wanted.  The alternative came to her.  On balance, it was very slightly better.

Rey shakily reached for the church door handle.  Ren must have felt her arm move past his body in that narrow space, but he still startled when he heard the handle click.

“Not in— not upstairs,” she whispered.

His mouth opened, teeth visible as he weighed it.

Another loud hoot of the crowd rang out in the night.  He saw her flinch.

“Oh, hell,” he said and threw the door open and pulled her inside, to the other side of the door, into the dark church.

Rey blinked.  The church, dim during the day, was inky black at night.  She could perhaps see the faintest outline, but she may have imagined it.  She held onto his hand tight.  He felt blindly for her face with his rough hand.  The skin behind his knuckles and on the hills of his palms were calloused.  He ran his fingers from her nose, and cheeks up to her forehead and into her hairline.  His breath was on her face and, gently, his forehead pressed against hers.  He ran his hand down the back of her neck and rubbed it, lightly.

“This is—“ he said.  “In the dark, maybe it will be easier.”

She laughed ruefully.  He kissed her temple.

“I— I have loved you—“

“It’s okay,” she said.

“No,” he said.  “I don’t expect you to love me yet, but listen.  I am at your mercy,” he said.

The fingers of his left hand loosened, and she let them slip out from between hers.  She reached for him and found his chest, and he hers.  She felt a tug and heard the creak of her laces running through the grommets.

“Always,” he said and kissed her.  This time his tongue pressed lightly into her lips, which shocked her a little.  She blinked in the dark.

She pressed her palm into his chest, not to push him away, but for a sense of where he was, in the dark.  She ran her hand along his chest, to the seam of his surcoat, waiting.  Every breath she took, she felt the cloth over her chest loosen until her gown hung on her like an overcoat, sitting on top of her linen smock.  He ran his hand along her waist and she shrugged off.

Her fingers pulled at the closure of his surcoat.  He stepped back to get it himself, out of her reach.

“No,” said Rey pawing at the air, and found him again.  The inside of her arm smacked into his as he stepped back into her.

“Don’t leave me,” she said.

“Okay.”

“Let me do it,” she said.

“Okay,” he said, more shakily.  He ran his fingers up her arm so he could feel her hands undo the closure.  She soon heard his surcoat fall onto the floor.  She pressed her palm back into him.  His skin was warm, and stayed in place where she pressed it, his muscles moving underneath it as he breathed.  He was a little less bold.  He clutched onto her arm and shoulder.  Her foot slid back a little, her fallen garment beneath her heel.

“I-I think we might fall,” she said.

“Oh?”

“It’s just, I can’t see where our, uh, clothes are. We’re going to trip.”

She felt him move and realized he was nodding.  He pressed her carefully against the door.  He pressed down on her shoulder and, following his lead, slid her back down the wall.  Her garment slid up her back, past her lower undergarment, until her bare back was firm against the door and her backside rested on her knees.  Her muscles strained from the effort of lowering herself without falling.  He reached and found her knees with his hands.  He helped her straighten one leg, then the other, on either side of him.  She panted.

“This is— this is hard work,” she said and tried to laugh.  He did not respond.  He ran his hands up from her knees, slowly, slower, until he heard her breath slow and his fingers found the edge of the cloth.  He pulled.  She lifted her hips.  She thought a moment.

“I, uh, we need to get it past you,” she said.

He did not stop.  Once the garment hit his knees, he reached up to her hips and pulled them down.  She slid down the door, her head resting on her gown on the floor.  Her legs were pinned by his fist wrapped around her garment, pressing her knees to her chest.

His other hand ran down the back of her thigh, around the curve of her bottom.  His fingers lightly probed  and she jerked, ticklish and nervous.  His thumb found her first.  He stopped.  He exhaled.  She panted.

“I hear this hurts,” he said.

“I-I— yes,” she said.

“I will try to make it quick,” he said.  “I’ll make it worth it.”

He pressed inside her firmly, and she gasped.  There was a little pain, but not as much as she expected.  His palm rested on her.  He waited for her breathing to slow.  He leaned up between her legs and kissed her.  She opened her mouth this time, and his tongue passed over hers.  She reached for the cloth at his waist and tugged at it.  His breath jerked a little as he realized what she was attempting.

He let her pull his baines down and loosened his grip on her garment to let her lean forward.  She held herself up by the muscles of her abdomen, half-sat up.  Gingerly, she felt for the bones at his hip.  She ran her fingers across his belly, not quite brave enough to reach down.  She felt his thigh, the hair at the top of it.  She felt one crease where his thigh met his torso, and then the other.  

There was a little pitting on the right one.  She frowned, forgetting the moment, curious.  The skin was thinner there, not velvet like his other skin but oddly smooth.  Curious, she pressed into it.  His hand caught her about the wrist.  

Her hand contracted, fingers splayed, caught at something private.

“Another time,” he said.

He guided her hand over, and it brushed against him.  Her breath jerked in and she lay back, shocked, and the pain between her thighs twinged.  He gave her a moment.  Shakily, she reached for him again and found his thigh.

He took this as his cue to once more gather the cloth of her undergarment into his fist and press her knees to her chest.  His thighs pressed into the sides of her hips.  She felt him at her entrance, pressing.  She reached up, blindly for his face and found it, fingers running over his brow and into his eyelid before resting on his cheek.  He hissed and turned his face toward her.  As he exhaled, as he pressed into her his voice came out.  One jerky, ecstatic, low note.

His abdomen, pressed into her thighs, moved as he breathed, hard and shallow.  Her shins rested on his collar bones.  He hissed in what could have been agony.  His stomach muscles tensed.

“D-does it hurt?” she said.

“No,” he said. 

His breath moved past her mouth, into her lungs, into her.  They breathed in and out, the same air.  “You?”

“I-I feel warm.”

He kissed her and moved inside her, his body rolling up her knees and down again.  She pulled away in shock.

“O-oh. Oh wow,” she said.  He bucked again.  The movement had the feel of something involuntary at first, but he steadied himself.  He pulled on the garment like he pulled on the reins of a horse, pulling her into him as he pushed again, slowly, deliberate.  She made a noise she could not help, a little yelp.  Her hips rocked into his.

His breath hissed out and he pulled away and out of her.  She grunted in protest.

“I want more,” he said.  He yanked at her garment and they desperately yanked at her clothes, her nearly kicking him in the dark.  He pressed her knee to one side of him as he pulled off her shorts.  She heard her linen gown tear at the shoulder as she cast it off and did not care.  She knocked him with her heel and he dove to the floor.  His arms were soon around her rolling her over away from the door and onto her back.  

It was an agonizing, frustrating tussle for him to find her again and push in.

She knocked her head against the ground, pounded on it, dug the pads of her fingers into his back at the sting and pleasure of him inside her again.  He ran his hand up her legs and she wrapped them around him.  

He did not move.  She waited.  She tried to rock up to meet him.  He pressed his weight down into her.

Unable to show her displeasure with him on her face in the dark, she smacked his back.

“Are you mine?” he said.

“W-what?”

“Say it.”

“I— I—“

He pulled his hips back, threatening.  She slammed her shoulder blades into the floor, pressed her chest into him.  She was not strong enough to pull him in with her heels.  He would not yield without an admission.

“Say it,” he said.

“I am, damn you.”

And when he moved again, she was.


	10. Chapter 10

Ren stayed inside of her a long time, long after he had finished, long after he had caught his breath. When Ren rolled off of her he pulled her onto his chest, arms wrapped around her.

He was very quickly asleep.

His chest was warm. Rey did not know if she’d fallen asleep. If she had, she had not lost time. The easy metronome of his rising and falling chest marked the off the moments.

As always, when she was alone, she thought of Luke, and of her friend Rachel, Phasma’s daughter, who had died during the first wave of the plague. More had gone, but Rachel, and now Luke, haunted her the worst. Her chest ached, every heartbeat a stabbing pain.

Grief was part of the rhythm of her existence, and it would wane if she did not resist it. She knew from previous losses grief never quite hurt less. It would come in waves, and the waves came less frequently over time.

She did not resist it. She let it wash over her, shed a few tears, and after an eternity, it passed. She slept again, and woke, and her thoughts repeated. Rise, fall, grief, sleep.

For whatever reason, sleep or the rhythm of her own body, her fatigue finally waned as well. A very faint red light crept through the windows.

The wind had started sometime late. It blew through the slit windows at the sides of the church. The glass window above the door rattled a little when it picked up.

Rey, very carefully, excoriated herself from Ren’s arms. And slowly stood, thighs and buttocks aching from her earlier exertion. She stood over him for a moment, to see if he would wake. He turned onto his side, rubbed his nose, and he was back under again. She could not make much detail of him, just the contours of his thigh and shoulder etched in dim reds.

In their desperation for one another, neither of them of them had removed their boots.

Rey searched out her underthings and gown. The gown was torn at the shoulder, along the seam. It could be mended with a little care. Rey thought in vain of what she could gift Phasma as an apology— the gown was worth more than Rey could earn in a month of work, and was sentimental to Phasma besides.

Rey checked it for more embarrassing stains and did not find any, except maybe a darkening across the front where Ren’s sweat had gotten on it during game ball. Rey slipped on her lower undergarment and, looking down, saw a dark something on the garment above her knee. She bent and spread the cloth out with her fingers and peered at it.

She was someone’s wife.

Aside from an ache between her thighs, her skin felt different: sticky and heavy, like a blanket. Perhaps, when he’d pressed all of his weight onto her and shuddered, it had changed her.

Rey heard a very faint slap on the slate floor behind her and lifted her head. She breathed in, and his hands ran from the sides of her hips over her stomach. 

“Good morning,” he said. He kissed below her ear. She exhaled.

“G-good morning,” she said. He kissed again, the corner of her jaw, lips loose, tongue caressing her.

“I am hungry,” he said.

Rey put her hands over his, stopping their advance.

“We shouldn’t,” she said.

“Why not?”

“It is day. It’s frowned upon.”

“As is making love on Sundays, and on Saint’s days, and in churches. You have led me to sin. I would sin again.”

His fingers gripped her hips. Her breathing sped.

“I would, sir, but I—“

“Yes?”

“I have not relieved myself since last night.”

He let her go suddenly.

“What?” he said. She turned. He’d taken a step back. He glanced down at her breasts and up, flushing. Rey looked down at his arousal, her eyes wide, and back up at his face. He turned an even brighter red. Rey’s face screwed up with conflict.

“I— I need—“

“Yes?” he breathed.

“— to piss,” she said.

He pressed his lips together and turned away. She winced.

“What?” she said. His shoulders shook.

“Are… are you laughing at me?”

He shook his head emphatically, his breath rattling percussively in his chest.

“You are.”

“No.”

“You do know women do that, right?”

He turned around, his hands spread, incredulous and laughing. “ _Yes_?”

“You seem surprised.”

“Do I seem that stupid?” he said. He wiped his face with his palm and looked around the floor for his baines, still laughing a little.

“Hm?”

He stepped into the undergarment. “I’ve lived in a manor, my lady. A lady empties her chamber pot into the street, I do not wonder where she found a man to fill it.”

“Oh,” Rey said. Her voice came out a little flat.

He gave her a look. “‘Oh?’”

Rey frowned, confused by what she felt about the idea of him witnessing mundane, everyday life. He had an entire life. He had not merely swept in like a storm to beat across her skin and leave ghostly fingerprints of his passing in the soil.

Rey recognized the feeling on her skin. It was how she felt before a heavy rain.

He bent into her line of vision. She blinked.

"What's gotten into you?" he said.

“It’s just, uh, surprising you didn’t come fully formed.”

“And you, my lady. My Athena,” he said, rolling the goddess’s name in his mouth, enjoying it. “Let’s get you dressed so you can find a place to piss. And we will eat, and we will try again. We'll have to ride tomorrow.”

"In the day, my lord?"

"Yes, we'll ride in the day."

"Not that. The other matter."

"Oh, that matter," he said. He grinned at her. "Is it day? I say it's night, my lady."

"How do you see, my lord?"

"I don't see a thing," he said. His eyes moved over her sheer blouse. She blushed.

He held the gown up for her, and she turned, arms out behind her. He slipped it over her arms and she shrugged it on. He knelt to one knee and tapped her on the hip, and she turned. He pulled the front together and deftly, correctly, threaded her laces.

“You're quick at this,” she said.

“I spent six years as a squire. When I wasn't fetching or fencing or brushing horses I was lacing old hosemen into their clothes and armor.”

He made a knot at the top of her bodice and tugged at it for good measure. He looked up at her for her approval.

He was naked to the waist, kneeling before her. He had not had the chance to shave, and his eyes were a little bloodshot from lingering fatigue. The light cast on his face was still very red, and getting brighter.

But no less red.

Rey frowned.

“What’s wrong?” he said.

“It's too light in here for dawn,” she muttered. She twisted to look up through the great glass window above the church door.

Even though the wavy, distorted pattern of the glass, she knew the sky did not look right.

Ren stood, nearly stumbling. He and grabbed his shirt from the ground, hurriedly pulling it over his head. He pulled his surcoat over him. He did not fiddle with the hooks, he held it closed with his palm, and strode to the door. He pulled it open and looked up at the sky. Rey looked up, past him.

The sky was a dark, undulating mass of clouds, with a bright red horizon. The clouds moved at a gallop over the dome of the sky. The air felt strange. It was not still, but it hung heavy and wrong.

“What is _that_?” she said. She pressed up next to him, and he leaned out of the way so she could push past. She stepped down out of the church, in front of him. She looked at the sky, and back at him. He was still looking up. He’d turned white.

“What is it?” she repeated. A small drop of water landed on Rey’s forehead.

“A storm,” he said.

“We’ve had storms. What is _that_?” she said.

“Why are you asking me?” he muttered.

“You look like you know.”

Flinched and looked down at her. He wet his lips.

“I’ve— I’ve seen this,” he said. "There will be a flood."

“A bad one?”

“Yes,” he said. He blinked. He seemed a little more present for a moment. “We should stay indoors, up high,” he said.

“I need to tell the others,” she said.

He did not respond. He focused back on the sky. 

Rey pawed at his hand. He let her take it. His surcoat fell open. He, twice her size, bent very subtly, as if he had been struck in the stomach and was trying to hide it. His skin was blanched. He, who had carried her into a room thick with miasma. He, who had told her their time had not yet come.

 _He_ was afaid.

And deep and far into he village, they heard something: high, throaty wailing. It dropped and started again. A woman’s voice.

The wind picked up, suddenly. A stinging, mighty wind. The rye hissed, and the scream distorted and became lost in the noise. Ren’s hair whipped around his face, and the hem of Rey’s skirts smacked a gainst her ankles. Ren blinked tears away.

He looked down at her, and when saw her, his face contorted, skin a deathly white. He mouthed something she could not hear, his jaw shaking.

Rey knew that face. When Phasma buried Rachel, when Rey had washed Luke’s feet, when mothers buried their children, and, she was sure, when Ren had found his brother, that was that face. That was the face behind the wail they heard echoing through the village.

He looked at her as if she were dead, she realized.

Rey squeezed his hand between hers and gave him a thin, unconvincing smile. She summoned every bit of courage she had. She did not know if she believed it was appropriate, just that he needed it from her. Rey took his other hand in hers and stood in front of him, on the step below him, shoulders square. She pulled his face down, closer, to his ear, and he to hers.

"What was that? I did not hear," she said. 

“This is my fault,” said Ren. He wrapped his arms around her shoulders loosely.

Rey searched for what to say. Anything that might help.

“If this is for our sins, we can repent,” she ventured. “God will have mercy.”

He tensed. He pulled her closer.

“No,” he breathed. He pushed her from the embrace to kiss her, hard on the mouth. When he was finished he roughly cradled her head to his chest, pawing at her like a child with a doll. She panted.

“My lord?” she said.

“I will not repent,” he said. "I will not give you up."

He opened the church door behind them. He loosened his grip to grab her again and pull her in, but she slipped down and away from him. She stepped backward, slipping down another step before catching her balance.

The rain had begun to fall in earnest, fat heavy drops. Ren looked down at her, wild-eyed, one hand on the open church door. He remembered she was not a doll and might have an opinion on the matter. He held his hand out to her.

“Come inside,” he shouted over the wind.

“I think someone has died,” she shouted back. “The others will go out in this if I don't warn them.”

“I don’t have the strength to lose you,” he shouted. He let the church door go and took a step down toward her.

Rey lifted her chin up, trying not to cry and failing.

If she ran and he caught her, it would hurt. He’d know how badly she wanted to go. If he stopped her, she could not forgive him. She knew how badly he wanted her to want to stay. Neither moved.

The rain fell on them. When the wind let up, the wailing in the distance broke through.

“Do not leave me,” he said.

She walked back toward him. His shoulders relaxed. His lips parted in relief.

“We can go together,” she said. He tensed again. She held her hands up to him, pleading, “Just to Han’s place. Just by the tavern. We’ll tell people on the way. If you can’t, I won’t leave. But please,” she said.

—

Kylo Ren imagined the last place he felt brave. He recalled it, summoned it back to him. If Robert or George asked him the last place he truly felt brave, he would lie and say it was at Crécy, his final battle. Men should believe battle was where bravery was at its purest. He would not have set a bad example for them, set them on the wrong path.

He would lie to them. To himself, he was honest about his weakness.

Ren, despite his fear, took Rey's hand. He was at her mercy. _His_ lady. _His_ wife. He did not know if he was brave at that moment or merely _hers_. They were the same thing.

As they walked into the village, his eyes darted back and forth. He followed her, blind. He had challenged God to a fight, and God had answered. He had not thought the time would come so soon. He tried to stay calm. When his blood became too heated, he left his body. Saw things. Revisited them.

He focused on his wife, in front of him, in blue, willing himself to stay. Despite himself, his vision failed him. The wailing and the dark sky took up his entire attention and swept him away.

He was at Crécy again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> But England is so temperate, you say! 
> 
> Not in 1353 it wasn't. 
> 
> Shortly before the plague got going, the climate changed from warm and really very nice to rainy, then stormy, then frightening. Villages on the wrong kind of soil sank into the ground. Agriculture suffered. There was a huge famine. Then the plague hit. They had nasty, frightening wind storms every few years. Of particular note is Saint Marcellus’s flood in 1362, which impacted both the British Isles and Denmark. 25,000 people died by conservative estimates. Ren is better traveled than Rey and has seen weather like this. 
> 
> —
> 
> I did not do end notes for the last chapter because I did not want to chime in on an intimate moment.
> 
> Let's talk about sex
> 
> Ren would not have been completely ignorant about sex. There were books, and he probably would have, uh, studied with interest. Theologians were also deeply concerned. I imagine Marjorie has given Rey a very thorough talk, and she’s also cared for livestock. 
> 
> Medieval Church rules for sex: 
> 
> \- Sex for procreation only  
> \- Sex within marriage only  
> \- Both parties must orgasm in order to conceive a child.  
> \- Missionary position only.  
> \- No sex on Sundays or holy days (including all of Lent).  
> \- No sex during the day, when you can see anything.  
> \- Preferably everyone should be wearing clothes, or at least not looking super hard at one another  
> \- If the dude is impotent, it’s grounds for annulment. If a man was accused of impotence, a gaggle of reputable married middle-aged women would be sure to inspect the goods in a very non-prurient way to see if they were in working order. I am not making this up.
> 
> Everything I’ve read suggests these rules were taken seriously. They were also frequently broken. They seemed to be more enforced in the nobility than in the peasantry. 
> 
> They DID seem to really care about the positions thing, though. Non-missionary sex, if you got caught at it, was punishable by years of penance and possibly death depending on where you were. Sex was barely acceptable ever, but damn it, having sex as if the woman was dominant, or to have fun, or with the man behind the woman like an animal was just criminal. 
> 
> Rear entry vaginal intercourse (or coitus a tergo) was something people especially got very worked up about.
> 
> Anal was right out.
> 
> There’s a series of novellas called The Decameron written right around this time, 1350 or so (although it is from Italy). In one of the tales, one of the men in it is tricked by his friends into believing he is pregnant. He believes them because his wife “insists on lying on top.” 
> 
> Thankfully, in the 13th century, the theologian St. Albertus Magnus decided to throw us all a bone. Being a theologian and a celibate man of God, he asked himself the really stupid questions: “What if they’re, like, really fat?” 
> 
> Yes, that was really the burning theological question he decided to bravely tackle for us all. 
> 
> Turns out God’s order to be fruitful and multiply makes doggy style acceptable if that’s the only way you can get it in. Here are the positions in order of natural to sinful, according to Magnus: 1) missionary, 2) side-by-side, 3) sitting, 4) standing and 5) a tergo
> 
> I’m going to speculate, for the purposes of this story, other positions are kinky (even very kinky), but not beyond contemplation.
> 
> Theology is weird.


	11. Chapter 11

_My beloved cousin—_

_I have thought long about your inquiry, on the Gospel and the Church’s position on killing. As you say, Aquinas is quite clear, based on his reading of the older texts, that killing the wicked defends the lives of the good and is, therefore, necessary. And it is true that the prohibition is against murder and not killing in that older texts, although, as I read it, those words are used interchangeably.  You are correct that Christ himself seems unequivocal in his submission to the Enemy.  However, his death is necessary to the Salvation of mankind.  That is not your burden._

_I must agree with Aquinas that killing is sometimes necessary, for the good of_ family _, King, and Christendom.  I pray God would not make a thing necessary which He did not ordain.  As for sin versus impurity— miasma— I do not take your meaning.  Rest assured you have been baptized in the faith.  While the blood you spill may be impure, what comes out of a man, not what is splashed upon him in the service of God, makes him impure._

_You are a talented knight, and I have every confidence you are blessed._

_Since I have already bought the paper and have space to spare, I should like to invite you to our little village to rest once you have served your tour.  I would like to introduce you to my ward, abandoned on my church step these fourteen years ago as a babe in arms.  I have not raised her correctly, I fear, or not as I would raise a lady had I not taken vows.  She is boisterous and I cannot keep her out of my books.  She has learned to brew from my neighbor, and I cannot keep her out of that either._

_But still, I am fond of her.  She is pious and honest and lively company of a winter’s night.  She is asking who I write to as I am writing now.  I will not tell her; God forgive me, but her temper entertains this old man._

_Your servant in Christ,_

_Father Luke — St Onesimus’s day 1347_

—

Ren had not been heartened by the letter, somehow.  He had received it before crossing the channel and had read it on the ship three times while crossing.  The ink ran on the paper.  It was uncommonly humid, he heard from others, even for the sea.

His former mentor encouraged him to look out over the water.  There were ships, hundreds of them, almost as far as the eye could see.

Sir Snoke leaned in.  “You will feel less sick with your eyes on the horizon,” his master had whispered.

His eyes snapped up, obedient.  He was ashamed he was so transparent.

Some man near him kept prattling about Sluys though he had not been there himself.  That man had been the squire of a man who witnessed Edward II himself fly into a rage and had, at once, sailed in four hundred ships across the channel to Sluys in France.  The man recounted in improbable detail the heaving sea, the English knights climbing up the sides of the moored French ships, and the French stabbing them with pikes.  The English, unbowed, had climbed up their friend’s bodies like ladders onto the enemy’s ships.

French knights had jumped into the sea in their armor, such was their cowardice.

Ren frowned.  That did not sound correct.  While some knights were cowards, few would deny themselves a Christian burial or the chance to be ransomed.  It was inconsistent with what he knew of chivalry.

He wrote it off as a second-hand rumor.

A man up in the crow’s nest of the ship started shouting in English.  Several men, including the long-winded men, craned to look out across the sea.  Ren followed their gaze.

“What is that?” he had said.

He craned and looked across the waves in time to see lightning strike the sea.  The crewmen shouted and shoved themselves against the rudder, turning sharply toward the land.

They landed miles from their intended destination.  Others would later say it was a blessing, after all was said and done, months later.

He did not agree.

—

Ren had been in tournaments and he had been in minor skirmishes.  He had earned a tidy sum from ransoming two other knights.  He’d smelled a battlefield.  He’d seen death.

He had not, however, killed.

He did not kill where they landed, at St. Baas.  There, where fifteen thousand men landed outside of fortified cities.  There was nobody to kill.  He was brought a horse, and they rode to Cherbourg, then southeast toward Paris, many long weeks of marching away.

—

He saw the gates of Paris, the end of their holy pilgrimage.  He smelled Paris and the great piles of human waste that piled up outside of greater cities.  They were close enough to taste the end.  Close enough to end it.  It would have been glorious to meet the French army there and live or die.

But that was not his King’s plan, or, therefore, God’s.

When they turned north, Ren somehow knew he would never see the promised land.

They fled north, and the French Army assembled itself and then pursued.

Dogs had started following the army as it marched.  Some feigned friendly, and they were a little fatter than others.

Those that could not feign friendly sat at the edge of the campfire light and stared.  They were gaunt and waiting.  Someone would drop a morsel, maybe, and they would be there.  In an army of fifteen thousand, some man might drop dead, maybe, and they would be there.  The odds were in their favor.

Ren stared back.

—

North of Paris, the landscape became brighter, somehow.  Greener.   Untouched by the pollution of war, certainly.  The roads less well maintained.  Unkept.  Natural.

Knights, Ren believed, were there by the edict of Christ to civilize war.  War was by its nature ungodly and unavoidable.  But they had rules that aligned with the machinery of the cosmos, which itself aligned with God’s own design.  Within the boundaries of those rules, righteous war could exist.

He was less sure about righteous killing, but war was clearly sanctioned by the Church.  It was sanctioned by his King.  He was bred and trained for it.  His favorite cousin and priest sanctioned killing, a necessary component of it.  If he was uncomfortable, that was a matter to surrender to God.

It was his job, as Lord and leader, to sanctify what they were doing.  To transmute their crass journey into a pilgrimage.

—

His group of men, one of the countless groups led by countless knights, came to their first unfortified city.  The men that marched ahead spotted it, cried out, and charged into it without his bidding. 

He shouted after, in French.  Some ignored him.  Most did not even speak French, and he did not know English.  But more than that, they would not have heeded him anyway.

He had failed.

Fifteen thousand men had not eaten quite enough for weeks.  They had not seen their families, had not seen their wives.  Did not speak French, could not understand French pleading as Ren could.  

They descended on the city like locusts and picked it clean.

The worst were the archers.  All were mere serfs and hired for whatever loot they could scrounge on top of their paltry wage.  No lord would be an archer.  They carried their newly invented longer weapons on their back, some kind of bow which required little skill and no honor.

Ren rode through the city as it screamed for mercy.  They made camp on the other side.  Through the night, he heard women wailing.

He kept his helm on and closed as long as courtesy permitted and after.

The army ate and slept well.

That was the last time they ate well on that march, and the last time he slept well for weeks.  They marched so long men started to drop.  So long that when someone asked where he was from, he stared at them.  He’d lost language.  The Word had abandoned him.

They reached the river Somme.  At high tide, it was so wide they could not see across it.  Messengers reported that Phillip’s army was a half day’s ride behind and gaining.

They were pinned.  They had run out of supplies days before.  He and others bent at the river to drink, to fill their bellies, to relieve the ache.

He dismissed rumors of a sympathetic fortification as the last-ditch hopes of dead men.

He was wrong.  They forded the river at a sympathetic castle fortress.  They were fed.  The dogs did not cross the river, and neither did the French before the tide came in.

It was not his time.  He began to wonder if he was cursed.

—

He remembered little of the battle at Crécy.  Others slept, and he must have, and then he was there, on his horse.  He remembered eating ravenously the previous night, and that no women screamed.  He was told the French missed the tide and did not sleep, and that because of the English army’s use of the land, there was nothing for the French to eat.

He sat on top of a hill. Their timing had denied the French the high ground.  It had been an effort to get horses atop it.

What he remembered was that he did not kill then, either.  Instead, the French fired up the hill, and their arrows buried themselves into it.  When the French saw that first volley fail, they turned and fled, and the archers ran into the advancing second line like waves colliding on a beach.

Rather than riding after, as they might have mere months before, English archers raised their bows and fired.

Ren had heard these bows were different.

And they were.

The arrows flew farther than Ren thought possible, into the chaotic sea of men, and they screamed and toppled.  More men than Ren could count.  More like blades of grass in a field than men, that numerous.

The archers notched their arrows for another volley.

It was already over.  A thousand French men were dead.  The next ten thousand killed was just a formality.

—

Three hundred English men died.

Only two French knights were ransomed.  More than that survived the onslaught of arrows and merely fell, pinned by the weight of their own armor and fatigue.  They awaited capture.

Instead, the archers took their eating knives from their belt and slit their throats.

—

Ren remembered riding down among the bodies as the archers descended upon them.  Four archers crowded around a body full of arrows and removed its armor.  One of them, thin as the hungry dogs which had followed them all the way to the river, looked up at him.

He believed for a moment his device and armor, clearly English, would save him.

He looked at their faces, those dirty serfs pulling the rings off a noble corpse.  The victors of the battle.  He looked down at his clean sword at his side.

He rode away, and, graciously, they allowed it.

And he kept riding.

He was afraid.

—

He remembered little of the next few months.  He spent some time at a monastery a few days south of London, although he did not remember crossing the channel.  He remembered hearing that same week rumors of a plague.  A ship, somewhere, had drifted into port, every man aboard dead.

He’d never heard something so strange in his life.  He’d hear of stranger things before long.

His father replied to his letter only to forbid him from taking vows.  He was the second son and despite his bad temperament more healthy than his brother Charles.  Besides that, Charles’s marriage had yet to bear fruit.

Ren spent his time in exile reading and writing to the one relative who would reply.

—

_Cousin,_

_I am glad to hear my father and brother are yet alive.  Give them my regards._

_We have been spared this plague thus far in the monastery.   It has come to the neighboring village this past fortnight.  I can hear the wailing inside the walls.  It has seeped into me.  I hear it even when it is quiet._

_You have told me of your_ ward _three times now, and now you tell me her limbs are pale.  I trust you are strong in the Spirit?  Do not be tempted._

 _The Greeks, I read, believed in_ a second _kind of sin, impurity.  The Jews as well observe this in nature.  I can only say it matches my understanding.  I am tainted, our army was tainted, and we brought it back to our motherland.  Perhaps this is miasma?  I do not desire to venture into heresy.  I cannot say if this is my reason or if it has been tainted._

_Only, the Greeks believe there was a cure, catharsis.  The purification of impurity through self-denial, fire, or pain.  Have you come across this line of thinking?_

_I have shared this with the brothers here, and they were uneasy.  They believe I am a little mad, I think, but everyone is a little mad now.  One does not think I am unreasonable.  He has made a cat o’ nine tails and showed it to me, let me keep it in my room.  We are loath to use it._

_If we are permitted to pull an animal out of a ditch on the sabbath, although that is forbidden, perhaps God will forgive catharsis to ward off this miasma.  Necessary or not, God’s design or not, we have spilled blood, and it has polluted us.  If we smear blood into buboes and let blood, and that balances the_ humors _and allows some men to live, perhaps it is because these things are something like catharsis?  Perhaps catharsis is God’s design._

 _I admit there is a swelling under my arm and my groin which I have not shared with the abbot.  He would get a doctor, and a doctor would confuse the source of my_ cure, _if I have found it.  I have been fasting._

_Please take this as my confession.  I will be making my inquiry after nightfall.  God forgive me._

_Yours in Christ,_

_Kylo Ren  — 1349, June_

—

Ren stripped to his waist and knelt in the empty monastery chapel, in front of the crucifix, in front of a relic of the Virgin Mother.  He had not thought to ask for her intercession, but he did then, whip in hand.  It had three flails with three thin metal shards pushed through them.

He was feverish.  His vision swam.

He swung the whip forward, and then hurled it across his back and forward again.

The pain was more than he’d anticipated.  He fell forward on his palms and gasped.

He was afraid.

He remembered his failures, first in that city whose name he forgot where he first heard women screaming, and then his cowardice at Crécy.

He swang again, then again, and beat himself until he could no longer feel pain.

Until God granted him a vision, of a lady in blue leading him by the hand across a bridge, out of the gates of Hell.  He knew it was not false because she looked nothing like the paintings he had seen.  Her hair was unveiled, as befitted a maid, and was tied in three knots, a style he had never seen.  Perhaps it was common among the Jews.  He looked behind and a crowd of serfs, archers, followed him.  They did not deserve it, but neither did he.  Salvation was required, not deserved.

He had saved them.  All those men who had sullied themselves in French blood and cursed his fellow countrymen.  Finally, finally, he was good enough to save them, good enough to defy God and, perhaps, have God listen.

He had done what was required.

—

He woke up, days later, his fever broken and half the monastery dead.

It had worked.  He had transformed his impurity into mere heresy.  A sin which God could forgive, perhaps, in time.

That night, he dreamed about the woman in blue, and again the next night as he healed.  That woman kissed him on the forehead.  In his dreams, that woman kissed him between his legs.

He woke up from his dream, shaking in pleasure, sticky, confused.  He thought it was religious extasy the first time.  He realized the second it was extasy of a more base kind.

Still, he prayed to see that dream again.

—

His father, hearing he had lived, sent for him.

When his back had healed, he went back home, back to the manor.  His brother, at least, seemed glad to see him.

—

_My beloved Cousin,_

_I am aggrieved to hear of your brother’s passing.  I am heartened you did not resort to drastic measures afterward.  The blood of Christ is sufficient to cover us all.  Have pity, and do not add your own._

_I am less well than I would like.  I believe I will soon meet Christ._

_My ward is named Rey.  She is my daughter._

_You described to me a woman, once.  Fair-limbed, in pious blue, her hair in a peculiar knotted style.  I was surprised.  Rey sometimes wears her hair like that.  I have not seen it on another woman._

_I will not recount to you her virtues.  They are too numerous, and my time is short.  Recall my previous correspondence.  I believe God has made her for you, and you her._

_Meet her and, if you believe as I do, plead her case before the King._

_We have all been denied the lives we should have had many times over in these trying days.  This plague has perverted our true natures.  You were born to be a knight and a priest, I am sure.  Perhaps God has granted you a boon of another nature, a new beginning.  Another way of unfolding as a representative of Christ._

_God go with you.  We will meet again._

_— St._ Eadburga’s _day, June of 1353_

—

Ren did not wait to meet Rey to plead her case.  He rode that day to Edward’s court, and then straight to Rey the following morning.

—

—

—

“— Ren?  Kylo?”  

He had tripped and caught himself on his palms.  He looked up.

“Rey?”

“Are you all right?”

He took a deep breath.  “Has the woman stopped screaming?” he said.

Rey shook her head.  “No.  Can you hear her?”

“Yes.”

Rey crouched, worried.  She rubbed her hand on his back.

The last time he had been brave was in the dark with Rey.

He looked up when he heard footsteps.  It was Marjorie, skirt blowing in the wind.

“It’s the Smith child!” she said.  “The husband’s got the swelling.  I’ve taken her into my house.  The husband will weather this alone.  He’s not long for this world.  I think he understands.”

“No!” said Rey, her eyes wide.

Marjorie shook her head, her veil battering against her ruddy cheeks.  “She can’t be alone now and she can’t watch him die in this.  God willing, she'll have a life after this, and this is what's necessary to make that happen.  I sent my daughter-in-law to Phasma’s.  She’ll be safe.”

“What about you?” said Rey.  People shared bread and bedding with plague victims and their kin did not frequently come out unscathed.

“What about me?” said Marjorie.  Her face split into a wide grin.  She glanced down at Ren.

“This is my fault,” said Ren.

Marjorie regarded him.  Her face, usually lined, deeply creased with smiles, was strangely smooth.  Joy had etched her face with lines.  Perhaps the light was dim, or perhaps Marjorie's inner light had been dimmed a little by the crises at hand.  Marjorie knelt, lifted his chin, and kissed him on the forehead.

“Ya ought to go inside,” she said.  “I hear these storms are hell.  Take care of yourself.”

Marjorie lifted the hem of her skirt and ran back toward her cottage.  Ren looked over at Rey, frozen, breathing heavy.  The rain had begun to sting the exposed skin on his shoulders.  Rey visibly shivered.

“Where is Han’s house?” shouted Ren.

Rey weakly pointed.

He took her hand and they shuffled there, together, as the water started to seep into their boots, and up into the loft, panting, soaked, and aggrieved.  Wind battered at the roof.  Ren sat on the new straw mattress and held her close to him as the world howled its rage outside.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The battle of Crécy has been called the beginning of the end of chivalry. It was very bloody and had almost no casualties on the English side. Also, knights had almost bupkis to do with the victory. They were, militarily, basically obsolete in the face of longbowmen.
> 
> This was when plate mail became mandatory.
> 
> Ren's heresy-- self-flagellation- was more common in France than England. Thousands of flagellants marched through French cities asking for God's forgiveness. Ren's heresy is unique to him, but has legitimate roots in the Greek understanding of impurity or uncleanliness.
> 
> When Luke is speaking about nature, he's referring to the ancient Greek idea of nature-- unfurling, coming into one's fullness. Plato conceived of our nature, choice, and unfurling as similar to an arrow being loosed. The choice of our nature is set when the archer makes his aim, and we only get one shot. Little else is choice.
> 
> Luke is essentially arguing Ren has been granted a second shot. A second, untapped nature which might be found as a married lord. A life worth having.
> 
> Who knows? Maybe he just wanted Rey to have someone to provide for her. Ren seems to have found Luke's argument compelling.


	12. Chapter 12

Rey waited until her heart slowed a little.  Ren’s would not; she felt it in how he swayed.  He’d buried his head in her shoulder, arms tight around her, pinning her arms to her side.

Time passed.  The window at the point of the roof gave off a sickly glow.  Rey’s clothes stuck to her skin, wet and heavy.

“Sir Ren,” she said.  He squeezed her. “Ren, I need to find a chamber pot.”

He released her and she slid across his body to the ladder and down.  It was tilted at an angle like a staircase with far-apart rungs. On the last rung, she paused.  If the floor was wet, they would have to get out of the building, and quickly.  They grew Rye because the land near Maidenhead was poor, a thin layer of soil over clay and sand.  She remembered after a moderate rain a house, family and all, had been swept into the river when the water rose.  She thought of trying to coax the large, terrified man out of the loft and had to put it out of her mind.

She stepped down.  The straw crunched.  No noise of water, no moisture in her boots.  She carefully stooped to her knees to feel the ground, through the layer of straw and aromatic herbs one of the village women had put down.  The dust of the beaten dirt floor was moist, but only with the heavy wetness that hung thick in the air.

She exhaled.

Thunder shook the building.  The loft creaked as Ren started.

“Just a moment,” she called up as she stood.  She hurried to the corner of the room under the bed and found it set into a stool.  She hitched her skirt, pulled down her underwear, sat, and did her blessed business after what felt like days of holding it.  It was not quite the same pleasure she had felt from Ren beating between her legs, but it was its second cousin.  And Ren, her second cousin once removed.  As different as pissing and that other act.

Rey sat a moment, ran her hand across her face.  She looked around and located the basin and pitcher, no doubt filled, and a bar of sheep’s milk fat soap next to it.  She pulled at the laces of her sodden dress.

“Come down,” she called up.

He was silent.  She noted the firesteel, flint, and tinder by the hearth.

“I feel a chill.  I don’t know how to start a fire,” she lied.

“What?” he said.

“I said—“

“I heard you.”

She had her laces undone and had stepped out of her boots by the time she heard the ladder creak.  Ren shakily headed for the chamberpot and used it.  She did not care to take detailed note of how.

He barely gave her a glance before taking the pitcher from the stand.

“Not all of it,” she said.

He grunted.  He kicked the straw away from the fireplace and wet it near the fireplace a little before going to work.  He set the pitcher down and strode to the corner of the room, near the door, to retrieve an armful of dried branches.  Rey retrieved the pitcher and found it full enough.  She pulled off her gown and then pulled her long undergarment over her head, and then stepped out of her breeches.  She unpinned her braids from her hair and the leather ties holding the ends in place.  She shook them out, and it fell in even waves and tickled her shoulder blades.  It would loosen stick-straight if she let it stay undone long.

This missed Ren’s attention until he reached for the firesteel.  He gave her a double-take.

“My lady?”

“I haven’t washed,” she said.  “I smell… distinctive.”

She poured a little water in the basin, soaped it up.  Lye soap was strong stuff for her skin and best diluted or it left red, flaky marks on her that lasted for days.  She stood in the corner of the room, facing it, and poured the soapy water over her shoulder and front.  She used her hands to rub it across her skin, under her arms, across her breasts.  She squatted to rub the skin of her inner thighs, the little bit of remaining dried blood and another castoff from the night before.  She turned around and found herself looking straight at Ren’s soggy velvet surcoat.

She startled and looked up.

Thunder rolled again.  The windows continued to rattle.  Ren’s face was blanched, and he swallowed, face straining with the effort to stay present.  He seemed to gather some courage and looked down at her breasts.  She lifted her head, puffed out her chest like a soldier standing for inspection, holding the basin in front of her waist.

“You don’t pass for a lady,” said Ren.

She ran her tongue across her teeth, her eyes hooded.  “Oh good.  This topic.”

“When we get to the manor, you cannot just disrobe and wash.”

“Surely they know how I was raised.”

“People are very set in their ways.  Especially those who have not traveled.  They believe a lady born in any circumstance will just know.”

“I am alone with my husband, sir,” she said. “We’re _kin_.  I might have country manners, but I know not to show up nude to dinner.”

He opened his mouth.  He shut it.  She ducked around him to refill the basin, fuller this time.  He turned around to watch her.  She, unwilling to squeeze back past him, poured it over her head in a long, cascading sheet.

He stared, his hand wrapped around the flintsteel.  She realized his stony regard was not disdain.

She refilled it one last time, and, meeting his gaze, poured it slowly over and down herself.  Over her shoulders, down her breasts.  The storm had brought in cool, misty air, and her skin broke out in gooseflesh as the water and his gaze ran over it.

“It is… strange to think of us as kin,” he said.

“By marriage,” she emphasized.

He nodded.  He dropped the firesteel in the hay.  It bounced, the noise muffled by the dull roar of the rain against the thatch and the wind pressing on and sucking against the door.  Rey suppressed her urge to back away.  He lifted his hand and placed it over her breast, looking at how it moved as he tightened his grip.  She placed her hand over his.  As it became too tight, she smacked it.  His fingers slacked again.

“Forgive me,” he said.  He bent his knees to kiss her.  She closed her eyes, stepped into it, casting the basin away onto the floor.  He wrapped his arms around her, tight around her ribcage, pressed against his chest, and stood.  She pulled away as her feet lifted off the ground, exclaiming in surprise.

He glanced from her eyes to his destination: the ladder to the loft.  He set her on the third rung and walked back three steps.  Disoriented, she leaned back and found the next rung too far behind her.  She gripped onto the sides of the ladder and tensed her legs against the bottom rung to hold herself up.

Something did not satisfy him.  He marched to where he dropped the steel, grabbed it, and, at the fireplace, used it to strike against the flint.  He threw a spark onto the kindling, and the kindling into the fireplace, waiting only long enough to watch it catch the logs before turning back to her.

It was brighter, she realized.  He had wanted more light.

Ren’s hand hovered over the hook closure at his breast.  He looked her up and down, from hair to toes.  At her brown arms and nipples, at her white breasts.  He unhooked his surcoat, there, by the hearth.

“Open your legs,” he said as his coat fell open.

She was suddenly out of breath.  She did so.  His coat fell to the ground.  He pulled his shirt over his head.   He was silhouetted by the firelight, his chest illuminated by the dim, sick, stormy light streaming in from the high window.  He watched her watch him.  He stepped closer, closer, closer.  

Too close.  She closed her legs as he crouched.  He looked up at her.

“Open them,” he said.

She swallowed, closed her eyes and remembered her vow to him, to be game.  She opened her legs and winced upward, to the corner where the ceiling met the wall.  She blinked when she felt his breath on her thigh and looked down.

His brows were knit in very serious concentration.  Surprised, she laughed.  He looked sharply upward, then back at her private area.

“Do they have baths at the manor, my lord?”

“What?”

“Baths.  Do women walk through the street to go bathe?”

“Yes,” he said testily, flushing.  “I don’t look carefully.   But this isn’t… visible.”

“I thought you said you didn’t look carefully.”

He didn’t look away again.  He placed a tentative hand in her hair, thumb on her belly, and pulled upward.  She coughed in protest.  His breath against her made her twitch.  His other hand ran along the folds of her skin, finding the entrance to her.  Her thighs shook.

“W-what holds such fascination, sir?” she said.

“I am looking for the answer to just that question,” he said.  She saw him pull his head back in the smallest of gestures, something like soft revelation.  He leaned forward and kissed it, open-mouthed, as if it were her mouth.  She gasped.

“ _That_ is sodo—” she said, but the feeling and the wrongness of it overwhelmed her at once.  She fell backward, away from his mouth as she let go of the ladder with one arm.  She flushed furiously and pressed her palm against her hand.

“I’m sorry,” he said.  “It was an impulse.”

She pulled her palm away and said, behind it.  “It’s, uh— it’s, uh.  I think that’s not permitted.”

He looked chastened.  He stood.

“But you are a good— you are a good man.  Sir,” she said.  She shut up.  She pulled herself up again, holding onto the ladder.  He licked his lips.

“Not very good,” he said.

“O-oh?”

“It is day,” he said.

“Is it?”

“Yes.  My motives are not pure.”

“H-how so?”

“I’ve watched a man kill another man,” he said, leaning forward.  She frowned.

“Sir?”

“A few times,” he continued.  “But I mean hand-to-hand.  Seen them get their blood up.  They spot one another, pull their swords.”

He ran his hand over the outside of her hip.  She winced, and was otherwise frozen, like a doe.

“In battle, it is permissible to fight for right reason, if we do not get our blood up,” he said.  “But if we kill, it’s three years of penance, and I know why.”

“Why?”

“Because they get their blood up.  They circle one another.  One man cried ‘I will bury my sword in your flesh.’  The other said, ‘I am not a maid; I am not easily frightened.’  They came closer.  They tested one another, steel on steel.  The skin of their neck, the little I could see, flushed.  One wrapped his palm around his blade,” said Ren.  He reached into his breeches, bore his teeth at Rey as he glanced down at her mouth, “and struck, suddenly, at that little bit of neck I myself had seen.  The victor’s breath jerked out of him as his— his beloved’s had.”

Ren bent and kissed Rey’s neck, his hand still down the front of his breeches.

“Why are you telling me this?” she said.

He drug his lip across her collar bone she shuddered.  His mouth found her breast and her nipple.  She pushed against the sides of the ladder, forward, arching into his mouth as his tongue sent little chills through her body, down to her toes.  

He whispered.  “We’re asked to be fruitful without passion, and to kill without it in war.  My experience, the fact both require penance, tells me they cannot be done without sin.  Both are necessary.  Commanded. What think you?”

He gave that same open mouth kiss he had done between her legs on her breast, on her nipple.

“Uh, uh, A-Abraham—“ 

Ren pulled his head back, eyes narrowed at her gasping out another man’s name.

“Yes?” he hissed.

“Abraham tied, uh, Isaac to a slab to kill him.”

“At God’s command,” said Ren.

“Yes.  I-if God commands it—” 

Ren’s nodded.  “It’s not our place to save us.  Just to obey.”

Rey had lost the metaphor.  “Obey what?”

He smiled, showing his pointed teeth.  “You can obey me,” he said.

He pulled his breeches off.  Her eyes darted from his face, and down.  He wrapped his hand around the base of it.  She did not have any basis for comparison, but its size was… worrying.  He saw her face, and he himself was caught between being pleased with her distress and distressed himself by her reaction.

“Watch,” he said.

They each looked down, foreheads pressed together.   The wind picked up for a moment, and they each tensed.  It passed.

She held on to the sides of the ladder; she would fall backward if she let go.  He gripped her hip in one hand, the base of himself in the other.  He pressed the tip of himself into her, then looked at her face.  She glanced upwards, and he stopped.  His face was stern.  When she looked down again, he continued thrusting into her, releasing himself and grabbing her for one final, firm push.  He looked downward, where their bodies met, and with his next jerking breath let his voice escape.  She tensed around him.  He leaned forward and began that same motion that had driven her half mad the night before.

The ladder creaked rhythmically.  Each beat, anywhere she looked, at him inside her, at his red chest, at him watching her face or watching himself as he worked, brought her closer to that feeling before.  She gripped the ladder tight, held her arms straight until they ached.  He sensed she could not hold on for longer, and held onto her hips, pulling some of the weight off with a little of his strength.  She leaned forward, wrapping her arms around him, and he lifted her, still inside her.

Her vision whited out as pleasure washed from between her legs and upward, over her entire body and she pressed her chest into him as her back tensed and her spine curved.  She opened her mouth until her jaw cracked.  Ren’s legs shook, his grip held, and he followed her a few seconds later, exhaling.  Rey felt his grip loosen, and she slid her legs down, landing heavy on the straw, and he popped out of her at an angle that made her wince.  He exhaled in frustrated protest as she leaned against his chest.

“Damn,” he said.  He wrapped his arms crossways across her back.  He tilted his head back, opening his throat wider to the heavy air.

“Feel better?” she said.

He squeezed her tighter.

Thunder rolled, and the storm beat its fists against the window panes in the leaded glass.  Outside, the village might have been gone.  Many others had already been swept away by God's wrath, and if he chose to take them, they would have been completely helpless.  Rey and Ren shook only in euphoria.


	13. Chapter 13

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Longer notes, since I skipped the last chapter. At the beginning because— well, I feel like it.
> 
> Han’s house has beaten earth floors with fresh straw. Beaten earth is not quite like dirt, it is hard, but it is easy to kick up dust from it.
> 
> Putting straw down allowed people to take animals in in the winter, or be a little messy, and simply sweep the straw out and replace it. They did have nice tile floors in very very nice houses, and the only reason they didn’t put straw down there was because you couldn’t see the tile you spent so much on.
> 
> Medieval aesthetics of homes were much more about coziness than about looking pretty. They did not really plan houses or cities to be what we’d think of as pleasing. The appeal of a house and its placement and arrangement was in having everything you needed where you needed it. Coziness. Enough-ness.
> 
> It seems like Ren and Rey are super religious nerds. They are nerds by the standards of the day. But aside from the Aquinas and Aristotle, most of what they talk about would be pretty easy for everyone to understand. It cannot, cannot, cannot be emphasized how central religion was in a way it just is not now. Every Sunday, for an hour or two, everyone anyone knew in the entire world went to church. Everyone. To the same church, even! And while books were somewhat common, and they did have other means of entertainment, weekly church was the universal experience and universal set of knowledge everyone had. In a time before people went to school, that was a big deal.
> 
> So while they talk about God a lot, God was a much more frequent topic of conversation.
> 
> The plague had a few days of incubation time, but could kill within three hours. It could also take days or weeks to recover from, if ever. We are not entirely sure what it was, although researchers have guesses. The best guess is that there were multiple strains. One was hemorrhagic, a bit like ebola. Some strains appeared to involve a lung infection. It’s called bubonic because the lymph nodes would swell in puss filled swords called “buboes.”

The light in the high window slowly turned from pale-puss green to merely gloomy as the wind died down.  Rey cracked open the door and was surprised to see it was still raining.  The constant din of the wind over the past several hours had left a dull ringing in her ears which drowned out the rain.  

Rey peered out into the waning storm.  Large chunks of wood were strewn across the road.  She shut the door again.

“It’s letting up,” said Rey.

Ren grunted.  They’d hung their underclothes by the fire to dry.  Ren was rummaging around in the linen trunk, naked as the day he was born.  The firelight played across his back.

“How did you get those scars?”

Ren pulled out a long linen undergarment, then another.  He threw one to Rey and pulled the other over his head.  She sniffed it and found it smelled pleasantly of cedar.  She donned it.

He and she were each in spotless white.  He pulled a pair of chairs away from the table to the fireside.  He slouched in his chair, legs straight out, toes warming by the fire.  His hand dangled over the arms of the chair.  She cautiously let hers dangle as well.  Without looking, he found and played with her fingers, stroking up and down each one.

“When you play gameball, do you wear your hair up?” he said.

“Pardon?”

“Do you wear it differently?  Not braided.”

Rey frowned.  “I have.”

“How?”

“I’ve tied it up in three knots.  What’s this about?”

Ren nodded to himself.  “I had thought maybe Luke had lied.”

“About my hair?”

He looked over sharply.  “I would have married you anyway if I knew he had.  I made the correct choice.”

“I never doubted.”

He looked touched.  Rey rolled her eyes.

“You cannot be like that,” she said.

“Like what?”

“How will you behave when I pay you a genuine compliment?  What if I did it in public?”

“You would not.”

She held her finger up to him.  “Don’t test me.”

“I would not dream of it.”

“Tell me about the scars.”

He told her.  By the time he finished, so had the rain.  She listened.  She did not say so, but she believed every word of it.  The fire burned low, and the sun in the window burned low in a bruised sky.

“I think I know what I’m here to do,” he said.  “Aside from what I have done.”

He lifted her hand to his mouth and kissed it.  She let him.  She stood out of her chair, her fingers slipping out of his.  She bent, his head in her hands, and kissed him on the mouth.  He let her.

—

Their boots were not yet dry, but their stomachs were empty and Lord Ren had to inspect his land.  They elected not to wear their sodden finery, but instead to wander out in white linen.  Ren kept Rey behind as if expecting an attack.

The first thing Rey noticed was the smell of tree sap and wet hay.  The storm had knocked down many limbs in the nearby woods and cast them into the roads.  To her surprise, there were dead birds washed out from the woods and dead minnows from the river.  A roof or two had caved in.  The tavern sign, the lamb and stars, had cracked in twain, but the building itself looked fine.

Ren, however, headed in the opposite direction, toward the church and past it, to the barn where Justine was stalled.

—

Two of the wooden walls of the barn had collapsed, bringing the thatched roof down with it and onto the heads of the horses.  They had remained tied up, trapped.

Ren stared the building from a short distance, then turned to Rey.

“She was a good horse,” he said.  “I will never find one better.”

“Did you spend a lot of time with her?” asked Rey.  She knew the answer to the question.

He nodded.  “It’s been years since I spent a day without her,” he said.  He ran his hand through his hair.  He looked tired beyond tired.  “I make a poor chevalier sans cheval.  I will be a little lost without her.”

Rey found it difficult to look at his face.  She crept up behind him and put her arms around his waist.  He stiffened for a moment, then relaxed.

“I’m glad I came,” he said.

“Me too,” she said.

—

Finn and Phasma found them there in front of the barn as the sun set.  Finn stuck his fingers between his lips and whistled when he saw them.  Ren started and absently pushed Rey behind him, reaching for his side for a weapon which was not there.

“Found ‘em!” shouted Phasma.

Ren took a breath.  Rey tapped him on the arm as she walked around him.

Phasma looked Rey up and down in her thin white linen.  Rey straightened.

“You were nowhere to be found, young lady,” said Phasma.

“S-sorry,” said Rey.

Phasma made a show of not forgiving.  She crossed her arms, tightened her face.  Rey’s face flushed even though she’d seen this show a thousand times.  She changed the subject.

“May I present my husband?” said Rey.

The corners of Phasma’s mouth turned up despite herself.  Finn’s face split into a grin.  He charged at Ren to tackle him, but Ren leapt back, arms out to grapple, teeth exposed.  Finn saw Ren’s face and halted himself in time, sliding in the wet gravel, throwing his hands in front of his face and flinching.

“Whoah, whoah, whoah, no harm!” said Finn.

Ren saw Finn’s face and flinched.  Ren straightened his back, looking down at the other man.

“Félicitation pour votre mariage.”

“What?” said Finn to Rey.

“‘Congratulations on your wedding.’”

Finn gingerly lifted his fist and pressed it into Ren’s shoulder, pressing his lips together.  He smiled up at Ren.  Ren’s eyes flicked to the heavens.  He exhaled.

He lifted his hand and pressed the knuckles into Finn’s shoulder.

George and Robert ran down the trail, spotted Ren, and relieved, knelt.

“Praise God you are well,” said George.

“And you,” replied Ren.

“How fairs Marjorie?” said Rey to Phasma.  Phasma looked away.  Finn licked his lips.

“Mrs. Smith passed during the storm,” said Finn.

Rey did not wait to hear more.  She took off running, and Ren, ignorant of the conversation, followed on her heels.

Rey reached Marjorie’s door and pounded on it until it cracked open.

Marjorie’s face was pale, with dark circles that may have been from crying or lack of sleep or something else.  She was in a loose fitting white linen under-gown herself.  She gave Rey a smile.

“There’s my girl.”

Rey pushed against the door.  Marjorie pushed back.  Rey did not wish to knock Marjorie over.

“Let me in,” said Rey.

“I am not dressed for company, my love.”

“Let them take the corpse out.  The air in there cannot be good.”

“She isn’t doing any harm.  Let her rest a while.  We had a busy day.”

“This isn’t fair,” said Rey.

Marjorie switched to French.  She addressed Ren.  He stood a few feet back.

“When are you taking us to leave, then?”

“Tomorrow morning.”

“By which route?”

“By Maidenhead, then south another day’s ride to Ren manor.”

“I’m afraid I will have to follow behind you a day’s journey.  I am fatigued.”

“Will you come?” said Rey.

Marjorie smiled.  “Of course.”

“You are not staying?” said Rey.

“Just a day behind, my love.  Always.”

“Do you promise?”

“Do you know me to be an honest woman?” said Marjorie.

Rey burst into tears.  Marjorie did not come out.  Rey turned and Ren was there, standing.  She buried her head in his chest.

“Shall we send Phasma to see you?” said Ren.

Marjorie looked at the ground.  “I would like to speak to her soon.”

Sweat collected on Marjorie’s brow.  She leaned against the door.  She said, “Before I take leave of you, I know you are a pious man.  If I should see our Lord, shall I say anything to him for you, or for your lovely wife?”

Ren did not ask how she knew.  He thought for a moment.  Rey shook in his arms silently.

“Tell him ‘Hello,’” Ren said.

Phasma walked up after them a moment later and froze when she saw Marjorie’s face.

—

Ren felt called to watch the entire thing.  Phasma took Rey off to bed and stood by him, arms folded, watching what he watched. 

Marjorie dragged a chair by the door and sat while she spoke to visitors who she had nursed or whose children she had nursed, until the sliver moon was high in the sky.  She sat on one side of her threshold, and her children on the other, and nothing crossed it save a loaf of bread Phasma brought. Marjorie laid it in her lap and did not touch it.

Months later he asked Rey to ask Phasma what Marjorie had said.  Marjorie had asked them each what they would say to God then told them each she would be only a day behind.

Phasma was too angry to have Marjorie tell God anything.

Word had spread they were leaving in the morning, and there was no negotiation, no question about it.  Ren would lead and they would follow him.

Marjorie said she was tired, repeated it for him in French, and closed the door, finally.

Ren watched the door long after it closed.

—

Rey woke up to the sound of Ren dragging her little linen chest from her cottage into the room, dressed in his mail and sword, but having foregone his plate mail.  It would be too heavy without a horse to carry them.

Rey peered over the side of the railing.  Ren heard it creak and looked up.  Her face felt hot and swollen from crying.  She remembered why and started crying again.  Ren dropped the corner of the chest onto the floor and climbed halfway up the ladder.

“My men and I have helped with preparation.  It is nearly time.  We will be on foot.”

Rey nodded.  Supplies were plentiful before Ren arrived simply because there were enough for twice as many souls, but the storm had damaged stores and killed livestock.

“You did not wake me,” she said.

“I felt it best.”

“How did you manage?”

“Phasma is very good at pointing.”

Rey snickered despite herself.  “Thank you,” she said.

"I should learn English," he said.

"O-oh?  Why?"

"So I know what people are saying."

She nodded.  He climbed down the ladder, and she followed.  He opened the chest for her.

“Pick something comfortable.  We travel light.”

Rey chuffed.  “Will your peers at the manor be scandalized if I show up too comfortable?”

Ren thought of his father’s face.   Of how Sir Snoke, his advisor, would look Rey up and down.  Of how they would criticize him bringing back a half a village full of serfs, many of whom were now overly friendly.  Of how they’d sneer at the practical reality they needed hands to tend the fields and needed to pay the wages to keep them on board, law or not.

“Damn them,” he replied.

She picked out a mustard-colored frock and he helped her with the laces.  She also pulled the veil she wore to church from the chest.  She pinned it in her hair.

"Married women veil in company, and I suppose I'm one of those. Does it suit me?" she asked.  She tilted her head this way and that for his inspection.  "It's only linen, but it's what I have."

He looked away, at the ceiling and blinked.  Was unsuccessful.  Frustrated, he wiped his hand roughly across his cheekbone and puffed out his chest.

"No?"

"You're mocking me."

"Only a little.

He looked back down at her.  "You look fine," he said.

Rey felt herself blush.

—

The village staged the preparations for the journey in the town square next to the tavern.  Phasma’s old mule had survived and was well burdened with a few books and some food.   Each person who had chickens carried one, and one or two younger men decided it was better to carry a lamb than be totally without livestock.  Poe had tied his best’s legs together and slung it over his shoulders.  It bleated in his ear.  Finn had likewise tied a cloth around his best chicken and held her under his arm.  Errol had thought to grab a rooster, something everyone had thought was daft, but which upon reflection they had no objection to.

Miller strolled up to Phasma.

“My knee—“

“I have saved you room on my mule.  Just carry my pot in your lap, and don’t let it fall.”

Miller’s brows lifted.  He opened his mouth.

“Don’t say anything.  I might change my mind.”

Miller slinked off.  Phasma turned to Rey.

“You’re going to the manor?”

“Yes.”

“I thought you’d go to Oxford first,” said Rey.  Phasma's son was there.

“I would love to see Hux, but no.  I’d—“ she glanced at Finn, who was handing out dried pottage “we’d like to see the manor first.”

“I’m glad I won't have to go without you,” said Rey.  “It will be strange, I think.”

“It will be yours,” said Phasma.

“Very strange.”

Rey turned to see where her husband was.  He was not hard to find.  He was at the center of the square, tall and straight and broad.  Ren surveyed the villagers as the bustle of preparation died down, his hand resting on the hilt of his sword, his head thrown back in that ridiculous way he had.  She thought, in profile, he was almost as striking as he thought he was.  He was more pretty than he'd like to hear, so someday she might tell him that instead.

“How is married life?” said Phasma.

“I think— I think I am very fond of him,” said Rey.

“Fond?”

“Very fond,” repeated Rey.

“Well, that is quick,” said Phasma.

“I won’t tell him yet.”

“Don’t wait too long.”

"Oh?" said Rey, surprised.

"I told Finn last night. Life is... it's too short.  Nothing else to it.  He's not— he's not my Brendol, or my John.  But I...."

Phasma did not continue.

Rey swallowed.  Rey ran, suddenly, startling Phasma.  She nearly ran into Errol.  Ren raised his eyebrows at her.  Rey waved him down, and he leaned over.  Rey stood on her toes.  Phasma saw her whisper something

Ren’s lips parted.  He nodded.  Phasma saw his ears turn red.   He did not look down at Rey, he merely stood and slid his arm around her ribs.  He continued watching the crowd until he was satisfied it was time.

Ren said something in French Phasma did not understand. 

"Oyez!" said Rey.  Everyone quieted down. "My husband would like to say something before we leave," said Rey.

Ren spoke.  Rey translated.  He avoided everyone’s gaze.

“I have been sent here, I believe, to lead you from the gates of hell to somewhere else.  Perhaps that is arrogant.  I came here ignorant of how to be any kind of lord.  I will never be much of one by nature.  My brother had it in his heart and blood, not me.  This is not the world I was born in or the purpose I was born for.  Perhaps you are in the same situation.  I had never thought my situation any kind of common, but circumstances have shown me my error.  Maybe we are at the end of the world.  If we are, I cannot think of better company to face it with. I am already a better man than I would have been had I had a choice.  By the grace of the almighty, I will be worthy to serve each of you until my last days.”

Ren swallowed. He ran his hand down Rey’s arm until her hand was in his, fingers interlaced.  He walked, south, toward the church.  The villagers parted for them, then followed.

They followed out the square, past the church and through the rye, toward home.

—

**The End**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the end of this conflict and story. Maybe someday I'll have another about what happens later. I will let you know.
> 
> I don't get paid for this. Consider a donation to Arts in the Armed Forces, Adam Driver's charity.
> 
> I have one other work in progress and a couple in the pipeline. Subscribe to me as an author to hear about those. My tumblr name is ms-qualia.
> 
> Thank you for reading. You didn't have to do that.


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